The New Luxury of Interior Design? Not Overly Polished Finishes, but Craft and Story, According to Mayfair Design District
Lessons in what makes luxury feel luxurious right now, from some of the most interesting interiors showrooms and exhibitions in London
I’ll be honest, Mayfair’s Design District isn’t one I’ve spent a lot of time in during London Design Festival in previous years. It’s not got quite the same density and buzz of areas such as Shoreditch or the Chelsea Design Centre, but this year’s theme felt like an interesting choice for an area so synonymous with wealth and a certain sense of polish.
What Matters Now is a thematic choice that really positions materiality at the heart of the new luxury design, and I wanted to find out exactly what that means in 2026. What I discovered? That the luster of perfection appears to have worn thin. That’s not to say we’re necessarily looking to patina in our spaces, but rather evidence of the craft behind what we buy.
How that’s expressed is a spectrum. I visit a showroom like Italian design brand Rimadesio, and its refined, elegant furniture is no less so than usual, but we might now see a visibly contrasted stitch in the smooth, burgundy-red leather of a new armchair. In more experimental moments from LDF, the furniture reveals its process in its final, often irregular, form.
Image credit: Future
Image credit: Future
At Monologue London, on Portman Square, alongside a vast floor-standing mirrored disc and a plum-red leather sofa from Tacchini, side tables from the Milanese Murano glass studio 6AM are a highlight of its LDF installation. They’re made, quite visibly, from molds of irregularly stacked bricks. And while you might not know exactly how they’re made, just by looking at them, you get a sense of what their craft involves.
Further, once you happen upon the versions of these tables made from an obsidian-black Murano glass, you come to learn there’s an even more exciting story behind them. In order to create this black finish, it destroys the inside of the kiln, so each piece has to be made in one that has reached the end of its lifespan.
Craft isn’t just about that visibly handmade aesthetic, but it’s the luxury of an anecdote.
The coffee table at the center of the Mint Gallery is HANN by Formsophy, a sculptural object crafted from recycled aluminum and basalt.
There’s an interesting dialogue between the idea of craft and polish in what I find across Mayfair Design District. There’s elevation in material, yes — those glossy textures of Murano glass and lacquer, the elegance of leather, chrome, and marble — but often paired with irregularity. Shapes are distorted, different materials visibly Frankenstein-ed together, perfect surfaces interrupted by texture.
But where these rougher textures are introduced, designers are not necessarily looking to create a ‘lived-in’ patina per se, but to showcase the natural capabilities of materials.
Louis Tipping Stevenson’s Vernacular Ceramic Bench really caught my eye for its textural form.
At Mint Gallery, on Duke Street, it’s a visual feast, but one of my favorite pieces was slightly more subdued. Louis Tipping Stevenson’s Vernacular Ceramic Bench is made from waste clay sourced from London’s ceramic workshops, shaped and manipulated into rectangular tubes. Its glazed surface looks visibly distressed, but this is created through the clay’s ‘inherent properties, limitations, and responses, ’ the designer explains.
The creative process behind these pieces feels authentic, and that’s what resonates with what we want from our homes now.
USM's showroom was reimagined as a record store for LDF this year.
My final reflection from my excursion around Mayfair Design District is about functionality and how the act of creation isn’t just down to the maker. Modularity is a design trend that will break new ground in 2027. Once only available from the most luxury brands, modular design has now become more accessible than ever, and offers the end user the ability to shape their spaces themselves.
It’s at the USM showroom where it hits home. I’ve visited before, and seen the endless combinations of its units creating everything from chic desks to walk-in wardrobes, to seating, but for London Design Festival, it’s been reconfigured as a record store to highlight its collaboration with audio brand Symbol, incorporating built-in speakers into its units.
As a modern design icon, it’s as charmingly analog a system as the vinyl records on display for this installation. And it goes to show that there’s real power in ‘making’.
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