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A takeover at London’s Ace Hotel shuns showing design on a pedestal and makes it part of the furniture instead Part of the joy of London Design Festival is that, across town – from high-ceilinged showrooms displaying pricey design classics to achingly-hip independent shops – we have a genuine excuse to come in for a look around. This week the Ace Hotel, hipster HQ of Shoreditch Design Triangle, is home to a relaxed collection of installations titled Super Stimuli, giving us a great reason to nose around its trendy lobby. The installations, by Bethan Laura Wood, Martino Gamper, Michael Marriott and Fabien Cappello, are all refreshingly casual, firmly at home in and around the hotel. For the porch, Wood has mixed plastic laundry baskets from the cheap shops of Whitechapel with cascades of flowers and foliage. Her floral arrangements, inspired by those left at temple altars, continue inside Ace’s restaurant Hoi Polloi, where they combine with her own slip-cast ceramics and those by Max Lamb, Martino Gamper and Silo Studio. Gamper also debuts the Recto Verso bentwood chair as part of the show – great to see already being enjoyed by café-goers on the opening day. Part of the lobby is a giant pile of beanbags by Fabien Cappello, who has covered the slouchy household classic in 25 types of textile and introduced a useful handle to the typology. Marriott shows three pieces in another nook of the lobby. The arrangement of his new pieces, a bench, cabinet and shelving, is inspired by the personal scale of the furniture in the famous historic painting St Jerome in His Study by Antonello da Messina. A prototype bowl and lamp complete the installation. Super Stimuli is a collaboration between Ace Hotel Shoreditch and Modern Design Review. The show runs until 22 September 2014 |
Words Riya Patel |
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