Darkroom patterns furniture and accessories with Superstudio's "anti-design" grids
London Design Festival 2014: design boutique Darkroom looked to grid patterns used in the 1960s and 70s by radical Italian architecture firm Superstudio to inform its latest collection of products and in-store installations (+ slideshow).
A neon window display by set designer Anna Lomax and a chromatographic series of paintings by artist Marcus James greet visitors to Darkroom's central London shop.
The installations were created to complement the store's new Off The Grid range of products and accessories based on work by Superstudio – a radical architecture studio that championed the motifs in the 1960s and 1970s.
"As huge admirers of Superstudio, we've set ourselves the challenge of interrogating their theory that a grid can be deemed 'anti-design' – by designing a complete collection based on grids," said Darkroom's founders.
The collection includes a series of tables, covered in over 3,000 Italian glass tiles.
The mosaics create a grid over the surfaces of each piece, but are used in different colour patterns to create variation across the range.
Cubes with faces hand-painted in primary colours and edged in black have open tops to be used as plant pots.
A set of plates is also painted by hand, decorated with a simple pattern of intersecting perpendicular lines laid over coloured shapes.
New knitted, quilted, woven and printed textiles were designed by Darkroom, London studio Shepherd England and Dutch designers Febrik to fit in with the theme.
Geometric jewellery by London designer Henriette Lofstrom accompanies the larger furniture pieces and fashion accessories.
"We've questioned what even constitutes a grid by taking it into three-dimensional formats," said the Darkroom team.
"This has allowed us to explore the effects of materials and textures on the rigidity of gridded patterns, creating fluidity and charming imperfections across a collection of decorative and functional pieces."
Darkroom is located at 52 Lamb's Conduit Street, London, WC1N 3LL. The collection was launched during this year's London Design Festival, which took place across the British capital last week.
Photography is by Jess Bonham.