London's 100% Design

Paris-born, New York-based designer and musician Sebastien Agneessens designed a musical booth to introduce Turkish real estate developer Nef as a brand that makes design instead of subdivisions. Three brass horn sculptures became the conduits for sounds recorded inside New York City buildings and then abstracted to take on rhythm. The booth is meant to point the way toward Nef’s upcoming residential project which uses a patented system to increase living space for a greater swathe of urban populations. In the building, which will open in 2012, tenants rent an apartment but also have access on a pay-to-use basis to amenities including an outdoor cinema, an observatory on the roof and a room dedicated to playing Playstation.

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Here's a close-up of the musical sculpture.

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Jody Milton of Milton & Mees works days doing exhibition design, so he doesn’t have much time left to create and market the furniture and interiors that are close to his heart. Milton presented the product of his moonlighting—a trio of classically modern and refreshingly simple seating—in the Makers Co. booth. Makers is a rare company that helps take the work of individual designers and small studios to market, doing everything from producing the pieces, suggesting price models and finding distribution to getting them started on business plan, educating designers in the business of design all along the way.

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Among several beautiful pieces, Caroline Olsson’s Bambi Table stood out—albeit on bent legs. Despite the name, this jointed table was inspired by that gracefully clumsy image of a horse kneeling as it rises to its feet.

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Samuel Chan is the nearly eponymous owner of the two-year-old furniture label Channels. The lightly quilted Motley throne chair has a wooden baton structure and turns on a rotating plate at its foot.

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A handsome duo of chairs also by Channels.

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One of some beautiful wooden pieces in the Chilean booth, the Tecla coffee table by Juan Pablo Fuentes & Asociados, which is made from MDF. It features a plywood interior and a glass top punctuated with a hole-cum-handle that can be lifted to store magazine or objects.

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These masterfully welded seats and tables by Decipher have useful voids and were inspired by the natural structure of stones in the UK’s Lake District and the man-made structures that are made from them. The industrial look of the finish belies the fine handwork that went into their welding.

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Part of young Chilean studio gt2P’s Digital Crafting Collection, the Gudpaka marries digital manufacture with traditional craftsmanship. It is made from waste Alpaca wool from Northern Chile that is not suitable for spinning or industry that is knit by hand into a felt skin that has been shaped using a CNC-milled mold to create the shade. The shade is lined with faceted tiles of Coigue wood in an unmistakably modern pattern.

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Another view of the lamp.

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Looking for an alternative to noxious plastics, young Korean duo Cho Eun Whan and Shin Tai Ho of Maezm have created a frameless, featherweight chair from the mulberry mucilage used to handcraft traditional Korean Hanji paper. In spite of the seemingly delicate nature of Hanji, which is used in artwork and calligraphy, the chair offers a solid seat.

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Shanghai-based Zhoujie Zhang graduated from the Central St. Martins in 2010 and returns to London with a series of faceted chairs cut and folded from a single sheet of mirror-finished steel. Zhang scanned friends’ bodies and then translated these bespoke dimensions into made-to-measure furniture in the computer. His inspiration came from an interest in Taoism and its emphasis on actionlessness and non-interference in nature. “I tried to apply this to the digital world,” he explains, “and let the objects generate themselves.”

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