Seven designers rethinking wood at London Design Festival 2025

Wood is a material rooted in craftsmanship and tradition but one that also offers endless possibility. At this year’s London Design Festival, we’ve discovered a variety of projects pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved with this everyday material, whether by working with discarded offcuts, combining it with other materials to alter its appearance, extracting its resin or finding new ways to manipulate it with tools and techniques.

‘We talk about wood being a very traditional material but also about it being a perfect material for the future,’ says designer Brogan Cox, who runs furniture brand Sebastian Cox with her husband and who is showcasing her ‘Tides’ collection – created with artist Nat Maks – as part of the group show ‘The Objects We Live By’. ‘Not least because of its environmental credentials but also because of the myriad ways in which it can be worked.’

This year, many of those experimenting with wood come from a younger generation eager to redefine what the material can be. Among them is London-based, Minneapolis-born designer Blake Carlson-Joshua of studio B.C. Joshua, also showing work at ‘The Objects We Live By’, who has recently expanded his practice from paper pulp to hardwoods, combining them with hand-painted aluminium inlay. ‘Working with wood has made it much easier to translate my ideas from paper to object,’ he says of the development. ‘Shaping materials with newer systems such as CNC and laser cutting has opened up new doors to creative ideation.’

As well as the individual pieces showcased below, during the festival, design enthusiasts can marvel at entire showcases dedicated to the material. For instance, ‘Grain Pile’, a show at Clerkenwell Fire Station, sees Max Radford Gallery join forces with British furniture maker Ercol. Six London-based designers – including Andu Masebo, Eddie Olin, Joe Armitage, Jaclyn Pappalardo, Isabel Alonso, and Lewis Kemmenoe (whose work is highlighted below) – have delved into the Ercol archives to reimagine its wooden furniture for today, producing new stools, tables, benches, chairs, cabinets, and a rocking chair in collaboration with Ercol’s workshops.

Just a mile south-west in Holborn, at Material Matters at Space House on Kingsway, the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) is spotlighting emerging talents including Andu Masebo, Daniel Schofield, and Anna Maria Øfstedal Eng, who have crafted furniture from No.1 Timber – an underused hardwood grade known for its knotty character – in collaboration with Benchmark’s workshops. Originally shown during 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, the work champions a more sustainable approach to material selection, using what nature provides rather than demanding perfection.

Also at Material Matters, the Wood Awards – a competition dedicated to architecture and design in wood – is exhibiting its 2025 shortlist, from small-scale furniture pieces to Feilden Fowles’ timber pavilions for London’s Natural History Museum gardens.

Together, these initiatives show that, when it comes to wood, tradition and innovation aren’t opposites but partners – and that a material humans have worked with for millennia still has plenty of surprises left to give.

Seven projects reimagining wood

Brogan Cox and Nat Maks explore marbled timber surfaces

The tides of their local beach in Margate inspired designer Brogan Cox and artist Nat Maks to see what happens when timber meets marbling inks. The results are two English-grown sycamore pieces – the ‘Low Tide’ coffee table and ‘High Tide’ side table – CNC-machined, hand-finished in Cox’s Kent workshop, and dipped into swirling shades of pink, blue, yellow, green, and white ink.