Two of Europe’s liveliest design celebrations return this month, each a multiday, multilayered extravaganza fusing local character with international creative talent. Paris Design Week runs from Thursday through Sept. 17, with scores of exhibitions and events weaving through museums, monuments, parks, plazas, galleries and shops. A centerpiece is the Maison et Objet design fair.
Across the English Channel, the London Design Festival celebrates its 20th edition from Sept. 17 through Sept. 25. Centered at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the festival remaps London into a dozen design districts with their own participants and flavors and includes the Global Design Forum, a conference, and the second edition of the Design London fair in North Greenwich (Sept. 21-24).
Here is a small sampling of what you will find.
The Light Side of Trash
That takeaway coffee cup you tossed into the recycling bin this morning might just end up hanging in someone’s home — as a lamp made by Blast Studio.
Created from a paste of used carryout cups mixed with a binding material made from corn that is shaped by extruding it through a 3-D printer, the Floating Trees light fixtures will be shown in the Park Royal Design District during the London Design Festival. Prices range from 200 pounds ($243) to £400 ($486).
Blast, which stands for Biological Laboratory of Architecture and Sensitive Technology, is a company based in West London co-founded in 2018 by Paola Garnousset alongside her Paris architecture school classmates Martin Detoeuf and Pierre de Pingon.
“We wanted to do something that would push forward sustainability,” she said in a recent video interview.
Cross-Channel cultural differences helped to inspire the project.
“Coming from France, we weren’t used to seeing so many people walking around with takeaway coffees,” she said. “We knew that the cups can be hard to recycle because they’ve had contact with food or are lined with plastic, but we wanted to give them a new life and show how we can create beautiful artifacts from waste.”
The cups are collected from cafes around London, and their pigments determine the ultimate color of the lamps. Blue lamps, for example, can be traced back to the Caffè Nero chain. (The plastic lids are not used.)
Where Glass and Copper Coexist
Omer Arbel, a designer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, best known for spherical glass lamps that dangle like icy berries, has a side hustle. He also produces artworks known as “113” sculptures from blown glass splashed with liquid copper. These two materials are ushered into “a kind of tenuous coexistence” that neither could manage independently, he said, creating a pleasingly shattered effect.
The magic of their making will be on view at “Material Experiments,” an exhibition in the John Madejski Garden at the Victoria and Albert Museum during the London Design Festival. From Sept. 17 through Sept. 25, Mr. Arbel will transform the space into a live glassblowing workshop, creating “113” pieces from copper and glass artifacts found in flea markets and secondhand shops. (The point is to echo the vintage quality of items in the museum’s collection, he said.) The completed works will be displayed in the museum’s Santa Chiara Chapel, in a frieze arrangement evoking Renaissance ornament.
The Art of Fixing
A stolen plate, a grandmother’s camera, an 18th-century sewing chest, a dog’s beloved ball. Objects are accompanied by juicy stories as they are handed down through generations, but they also collect chips, fractures and teeth marks.
“R for Repair,” opening Sept. 17 as part of the London Design Festival, is the sequel to an exhibition mounted in Singapore in January of 10 broken objects supplied by the public and resurrected by professional designers. Hosted by the Victoria and Albert Museum with the DesignSingapore Council and the National Design Centre in Singapore, it will include three items from the first show along with 10 new pieces.
The curators — Hans Tan of Singapore and Jane Withers of Britain — made the designer-object pairings, putting Rio Kobayashi, a London-based woodworker, for instance, in charge of fixing the sewing kit, and handing off the dog’s ball to the British designer Thomas Thwaites, who once lived among a herd of goats for several days in the Alps (he moved on all fours with appendages imitating goat legs).
As for the ceramic plate, which the actress Jane Birkin lifted from Maxim’s restaurant in Paris in the 1970s, it was repaired by designers from Studio Dam in Singapore using metal rivets in a traditional Chinese technique known as juci.
“We want to touch on emotional attachment and the very real part this plays in making our possessions endure,” Ms. Withers said. “The designers’ interventions have added new layers to the objects often making the ‘repaired’ object much more interesting than the original.”
The exhibition is on view through Oct. 30.
A Parisian Art Space You Can Sleep In
Amélie du Chalard has a background in finance, an eye for aesthetics and a habit of creating comfortable art spaces that tempt visitors to drop their things and stay for a while.
Which they can now do. In time for Paris Design Week, Ms. du Chalard has opened the third in her Ambroise Collection, a group of Parisian apartments that have been decorated by contemporary artists and designers and are available for short-term rental. The artworks displayed in the properties, many created by people Ms. du Chalard represents at her gallery in the Sixth Arrondissement, are for sale.
The name Ambroise comes from Ambroise Vollard — the famed dealer of works by European painters from Renoir to Picasso — who lived on the same Left Bank street where Ms. du Chalard, 34, bought and transformed her first property. She found her second in the Marais district, near the Pompidou Center.
The latest property in the collection is in an 18th-century building on the Quai des Célestins, facing Île St.-Louis, in the former residence of the artist Antoine-Louis Barye. It is a two-bedroom duplex with an office, featuring parquet floors, ceiling-high windows and a staircase designed by Tess Walraven, the unit’s architect. The furnishings are bespoke wood pieces mixed with vintage finds — many of which are upholstered in custom fabrics. The kitchen contains a bar covered in 18th-century tiles.
Ms. du Chalard said the idea for Ambroise came from the many collectors who stopped by her homey art gallery and proposed renting it for their own use. “When people ask dozens and dozens of times, you think it would be a nice idea to create this experience,” she said.
Ambroise Célestins starts at 1,600 euros (about $1,602) per night, with a two-night minimum. An optional private chef and tour guide are extra.
