London Design Festival 2013: designers Scholten & Baijings set up a still life depicting a dinner party in progress at the V&A museum for the London Design Festival (+ slideshow).

Scholten & Baijings installed a large dining table set for a party of guests in the ornate gilded Norfolk House Music Room in the British Galleries of the V&A museum.

Cutlery is skewed, glasses are half full and food is strewn across the table, as if the party is in progress but all the guests have vanished.

"The visitor enters just seconds after the guests have left to smoke a cigarette in the garden," said the designers. "One can use this unguarded moment to look at the luxurious dinner table and the interior undisturbed."

Scholten & Baijings laid the table with its homeware, including the silver serving set for tea and cake designed for Georg Jensen and the range of glassware featuring swatches of colour, graduated tints and grid lines for Hay.

The designers wanted to use real food on the the plates but had to serve model vegetables instead.

Sounds created using the objects are included in a piece of music composed by Moritz Gabe and Henning Grambow, which plays softly in the background.

For this year's London Design Festival the V&A museum is also hosting a giant chandelier of Bocci lights in the main hall and is displaying latest acquisitions including the world's first 3D-printed gun.

Elsewhere, an Escher-style staircase has been erected outside Tate Modern. Check out more events around the city on our digital map »

See more design by Scholten & Baijings »
See more stories about the V&A museum »
See all our London Design Festival 2013 coverage »

Here's some extra details from the designers:

The Dinner Party/True-to-life Design - Still Life by Scholten & Baijings
London Design Festival at the Victoria & Albert Museum 2013

In galleries and museums, design objects are frequently displayed on pedestals or in glass vitrines but rarely in something resembling the everyday living environment for which they were conceived. In the context of London Design Festival, Scholten & Baijings will be turning things around for a change. Or, rather, inside out. Because for nine days Scholten & Baijings will transform The Norfolk House Music Room in the British Galleries in the V&A Museum into a completely dinner setting in a lived-in home.

True to life

Visitors might hesitate to walk into the gallery because it looks so much like a lifelike dinner setting. The cleaning people have received special instructions to ensure that they don't tidy up certain parts of the exhibition.

Objective

The objective of the presentation is to let people see things in a different way. More adventurously, because many designs are only discovered at a second glance. More objectively, because there are no nameplates, so that the boundaries between exclusive design and mass products become blurred and prejudices disappear.

"The visitor enters just seconds after the guests have left to smoke a cigarette in the garden. One can use this unguarded moment to look at the luxurious dinner table and the interior undisturbed. The music is playing softly…"