A place called home|London Design Festival

A place called home | London Design Festival
Trafalgar Square, 18-22 September 2014

Text by Federica Lusiardi, Inexhibit. Photos by Inexhibit

London, Trafalgar Square: at half past ten on a Thursday morning, a small crowd assemble in the area between the fountains and the stair leading to the National Gallery. All watching the workmen that are in a hurry to complete four little colored houses that seems have popped up from a fairy tales book. They actually are part of a temporary installation suggestively entitled “A place called home”; the landmark project of the 2014 edition of the London Design Festival.
The project, supported by Airbnb, is focused on a classic, yet always fascinating, theme of design: what a home actually is. What makes the difference between a “house” and a “home” and which are the ingredients that create such a distinction?
Four internationally-acclaimed designers were asked to give their answer: Patternity, Jasper Morrison, Raw Edges and Studioilse. Each provided a reply by proposing his personal vision of the domestic environment.

Jasper Morrison
The home by Jasper Morrison, he ironically entitled “house of a pigeon fancier” because of its location in the middle of Trafalgar Square, is a bright space aimed to find a precise balance between inside and outside, a comfortable place where each object represents an answer to a well-defined need: sleeping, working, relaxing.

Raw Edges
The house conceived by Raw Edges is a kind of a mutant home: the internal walls move on tracks thus creating ever-changing spaces adapting themselves to the needs and requirements of its inhabitants

Studioilse
The little blue house designed by Studioilse, with its neon sign on the roof, represents the domestic space by creating an “immersive” environment that adopts various media: writings, videos projected on the walls depicting different everyday moments, sounds and fragrances reproducing the smells of a home.

Patternity
The house by Patternity represents a metaphor of the Earth, our collective home: people are invited to interact with a large house-shaped kaleidoscope, which creates constantly changing visual patterns by collecting images through a camera, then reproduced in real-time on a monitor fixed on its side.

See more on The London Design Festival 2014 on Inexhibit