PAD London: 7 Booths That Set the Tone for Collectible Design in 2025

Each October, PAD London gathers the world’s most discerning voices in design, yet its influence extends far beyond the fair itself. This year’s edition revealed a quieter confidence — an embrace of material honesty, sculptural form, and cultural dialogue. The most compelling booths were less about display than atmosphere, proposing new ways of living with design that feel both intimate and enduring. Together, they traced a refined vision for the year ahead: one defined by restraint, craftsmanship, and emotional depth.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery: Material Intelligence and Emotion

Carpenters Workshop Gallery once again showed why it remains the benchmark for functional art, uniting eleven designers in a study of how design can think, move, and feel. Maarten Baas’s Jan Jutte Clock — a filmed performance of time drawn in real moments — brought animation to craft, while Zanine Caldas’s Denuncia Bench turned ecological protest into carved form. Nacho Carbonell’s Mesh Table Lamp pulsed like a living organism, and Aki + Arnaud Cooren’s Ishigaki Lamp transformed light into a meditation on underwater stillness. Works by Vincenzo de Cotiis, Ingrid Donat, DRIFT, and Roger Herman completed a presentation defined by elegance and experimentation. Each piece embodied the gallery’s signature philosophy: emotion made physical through material intelligence.

What we love: A luminous, sculptural environment where art and function dissolved into one contemplative whole.

Nilufar Gallery: The Poetry of Form and Memory

Guided by Nina Yashar’s curatorial vision, Nilufar’s dual presentation — Booths B16 and C14 — embodied collectible design as cultural dialogue. At B16, contrasts of bronze, resin, and glass formed a tactile landscape: Filippo Carandini’s Mirror Sole cast in sand like a celestial relic; Flavie Audi’s Prescient Vortex swirling with geological luminosity; and Allegra Hicks’s Metamorphosis table transforming linen and crochet into sculptural permanence. Bethan Laura Wood’s Meisen Chair evoked entomological poetry, while Christian Pellizzari’s mirrored Murano lighting glimmered with botanical delicacy. These contemporary voices conversed with 20th-century masters — Maria Pergay, Gabriella Crespi, Paul Evans — reaffirming Nilufar’s role as a bridge between epochs. Across the aisle, Delhi-based Vikram Goyal’s collaboration revealed brass as language: his Bagh and Thar series shimmered with repoussé textures echoing Indian gardens and dunes, merging monumentality and craft.

What we love: Nilufar transforms design into storytelling — where material, culture, and intuition become one continuous rhythm.

Laffanour / Galerie Downtown: Architecture as Furniture

François Laffanour’s booth centered on Pierre Chareau’s 1924 rosewood boiserie, turning a fragment of architectural history into an immersive set piece. Around it unfolded a conversation between rationalism and sensuality: Charlotte Perriand’s mahogany table, Jean Prouvé’s red-leather Direction Chair, and José Zanine Caldas’s carved Bench (1972) balanced restraint with organic vitality. Contemporary additions by Pucci de Rossi and Richard Texier extended this lineage, showing that the DNA of French modernism — clarity, proportion, integrity — still defines the language of interior space. The booth read as both archive and manifesto: a reminder that great design begins with architecture and ends in lived emotion.

What we love: The serenity of Chareau’s rosewood shell — design as architectural intimacy, glowing with timeless intelligence.

88 Gallery London: Emergence and the Alchemy of Process

Under the curatorial eye of Kate Campbell and Erik Müllendorff, 88 Gallery presented Emergence, an ode to process as poetry. Anchored by Ado Chale’s monumental Volcanique bronze table — molten, geological, and alive — the booth wove together material experiment and intuitive form. Kick Veldman’s Casting Mirrors caught the moment metal turns liquid to solid; Michela Cattai’s Foresta light, drawn from the Venetian Lagoon, breathed with asymmetrical fragility; William Waterhouse’s Vert 1 merged kinetics and luminosity. New wooden works by Mroz + Boullier and Abel Cárcamo shaped grain into movement, while Ben Storms’s ExHale marble cushion inverted expectation, turning stone into softness. Each piece spoke to the alchemy of transformation — where imperfection becomes beauty.

What we love: The booth’s quiet revelation that true artistry lies not in control but in surrender to material surprise.

Sceners: Minimalism, Mysticism, and the Spirit of Form

Sceners curated a transhistorical meditation on essence — aligning Donald Judd’s severe rationalism with the metaphysical abstraction of Jean Degottex, and the ornamental mysticism of Carlo Bugatti and Jacques Adnet. Judd’s Douglas-fir furniture, austere yet radiant, conversed with Degottex’s Horsphère Bois (III) — a painting that dissolves matter into breath — while Bugatti’s 1902 parchment-and-copper console brought back the theatre of craftsmanship, and Adnet’s saddle-stitched modernism exemplified French precision at its most sensual. Together, these figures charted a century-long pursuit of clarity — proof that form, whether minimal or ornate, can carry spiritual weight.

What we love: Sceners transformed a fair booth into a temple of proportion — where silence itself became design.

Willy Rizzo Gallery: Glamour as Geometry

Willy Rizzo Gallery conjured the cinematic allure of 1970s Paris, merging photography, design, and lifestyle into one seductive frame. Shimmering brass and stainless steel structures reflected the sophistication of Rizzo’s lens: the Elliptique Dining Table in Verde Antigua marble and brushed brass exuded sculptural simplicity, while the petrol-blue suede Gin Bar and modular leopard sofa captured an age of unapologetic luxury. Vintage portraits of Dalí, Bardot, and Callas hung like muses over the scene, linking Rizzo’s dual mastery of form and image. In a fair dominated by conceptualism, this booth offered pure sensual intelligence — design that knows how to perform.

What we love: Its perfect synthesis of elegance and attitude — glamour reduced to architectural discipline.

Dumonteil Gallery: Nature as Sculpture

Dumonteil’s presentation bridged art and design through a refined menagerie of bronze, brass, and lacquer. Jean-Marie Fiori’s gilded Sumer Cabinet and Hisaé Console reimagined architecture through animal grace, while Daniel Daviau’s Mouflon Bench and Whisperer Raccoon captured vulnerability in sculptural stillness. Marine Breynaert’s Imago wall lamps — brushed brass pierced with porcupine quills — infused surreal tactility into the mix. The result was a space suspended between nature and mythology, where craftsmanship becomes language and light seems to breathe.

What we love: Dumonteil redefined decorative art as emotion — sculpture that feels alive in both spirit and surface.

Across these seven presentations, PAD London 2025 revealed the future of collectible design as deeply human — slow, tactile, and emotionally resonant. Whether through Nilufar’s cross-cultural alchemy or Carpenters Workshop’s meditative dialogue, the fair proved that great design endures not for its novelty, but for its ability to move and to live gracefully in time.