Clerkenwell Design Week 2025: 
3 Key Take-Aways

Offering an immersive design experience filled with talks, exhibitions and installations, Clerkenwell Design Week never fails to curate an exciting visual journey filled with insights on where Interior Design is heading for the future. Here’s a round up of some key insights from the festival.

Rooted in tradition


Many showrooms at Clerkenwell are heritage-led design institutions, showcasing timeless pieces along side contemporary innovation. This year, a lot of brands really leaned into celebrating mid-century design to create retro-themed spaces across the city.
Both Camira & Interface launched new collections directly inspired by 1950’s fashion and tailoring, with neutral black & beige forming a core palette which focussed on various contrasting weaves and stitching details.
Velvet, chrome, marble, and walnut made frequent appearances throughout, with bold red accents adding visual energy to otherwise neutral spaces. All of these elements worked together to create dynamic schemes that revered both past and present design.

Environmentally embedded

For designers and specifiers, sustainability is a non-negotiable aspect of every project we do and can no longer just be a buzzword used to tick boxes. It needs to be intrinsically – and honestly – woven into all aspects of our work.
Until fairly recently, brands were using more overt storytelling and wordy rhetoric to try and position themselves within the world of sustainability – whereas this year at Clerkenwell felt different. Environmental considerations seemed to be much more intrinsically and transparently fed into all elements of design, giving this key theme an almost matter-of-fact feel; a refreshing experience to have as a designer.
Showrooms such as Flokk & Interface demonstrated the transparency of their manufacturing processes in literal but unpretentious ways, which seemed to feed into an increased visibility of simple, raw materials such as aluminium and timber that could be observed across a lot of the festival.

Raw & honest

The theme of honesty & transparency continued across Clerkwenwell as a whole, with displays of exposed structures and raw textures celebrating the simplicity and effectiveness of good, honest design.
Raw aluminium, stainless steel, natural and stained plywood all formed key elements within architectural spaces as well as the furniture pieces within them.
This elevated functionality and transparent approach gave an unpretentious feel that was palpable in both high-end heritage spaces and contemporary installations – showing a general shift in the direction of clarity and honesty across multiple aspects of the design world.