CamuDesigns is the product of Alexis Camu, a young product and furniture designer based in Paris, where he is finishing his MA in Interior Design and Architecture at l’École Camondo. His domestic objects aim to bring life, joy and a pop-art spirit through colour, form and materials. Influenced by the craftsmanship of Art Deco and the visual energy of the 1960s, he seeks to bring back the bold “BANG” and “POW” we often miss today.
The object at our Christmas Edit, ‘A Toi,’ was designed to bring a unique and colourful touch to one’s interior, blending simple aesthetics with bold colours. Inspired by Pierre Charreau and Josef Alber’s Hommage to the Square, ‘A Toi’ can be a stool, a side table, a foot rest or simply a decorative object – the choice is yours!
Martino Gamper is an artist and designer based in London. He began his career in furniture making in Merano and then studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and gained a MA at the Royal College of Art. Gamper engages in a variety of projects from exhibition design, interior design, one-off commissions and the design of mass-produced products for the cutting edge of the international furniture industry. For the Christmas Edit, he is presenting a Walnut and Cherry with stainless steel “Pepperina” and a limited-edition laptop stand.
He has presented his work internationally, and has received the Moroso Award for Contemporary Art and the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year, Furniture Award and was awarded an OBE for services to Design.
Laura Huston is a ceramicist based in Norfolk. She graduated from Chelsea Art College in 2006 with a BA (Hons) in Spatial Design and received pottery training at Morley, Kensington & Chelsea under Akiko Hirai and City Lit.
Her ceramics emerge from a deep engagement with the natural world. Drawing on personal experience, stories, and art from antiquity to the present day, she hopes to capture a sense of beauty and the ritual aspects of the everyday. Her ceramics aim to express the essence of natural phenomena through the medium of glazed ceramics. Always experimenting and challenging herself, she relishes opportunities to explore new avenues of expression. She uses a mixture of wheel-thrown and hand-building techniques, mixing clays to achieve different surface colour and texture, then glazing and firing to stoneware temperatures.
Paola Petrobelli is a London-based artist and designer. She is working exclusively with Murano Glass and its famed Venetian artisans. Her background in molecular biology led her to explore the workings that underpin the world and lend her an understanding of how nature strips back form to the most basic function, which is mirrored in her work. Her objects are functional, they need to be handled and interacted with. For this Christmas Edit, she is showing 4 new portable Murano Glass lamps.
She has had commissions Wallpaper Magazine, Christian Dior and Peroni and collaborated with Gallery Libby Sellers, Perimeter Art and Design and Nilufar. Her work has been shown at the Triennale Design Museum, Salone Del Mobile Milano, The London Design Festival, and at fairs including Design Miami/Basel and the Pavillion of Art.
James Shaw is a designer and maker based in London. He explores the material landscape in a hands-on way. His work aims to interrogate the material, systemic and formal approaches to the creation of objects. Frequently his work considers the resources around us, challenging the notion of ‘waste’ to create new beautiful materials. For the Christmas Edit, we are showing his “Plastic Baroque” candle sticks and loo roll holders.
He has exhibited internationally and past awards include being nominated for the Design Museum Designs of the Year Award and winning the Arc Chair Design Award. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, The V&A, The Montreal Museum of Art, The Design Museum Ghent and The Museum of London among others.
Anne Roger Lacan is an artist based in Paris. Her practice has strong connections with Art Brut, the artistic movement initiated by Jean Dubuffet. She uses found objects and creates sculptures with very strong psychological content. Her work is especially poignant in its attention to details. Her objects act as a link between yesterday and today and contains within itself the foundation of a narrative — a story that brings together the fragments of a life, dreams forgotten and lost, found again. Always reminding us of the fragility of our identity and our sense of self.
Her collection of meticulously hand-painted jackets, titled “Taketja,” come with a Manifesto that ends in: A jacket for work, for a date, to be noticed, to be remembered, to be awaited! A one-and-only jacket. A jacket for life. A jacket of art.