Decorex 2019: Inside the Fair’s First Edition at Olympia

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 9 min

Decorex spent four decades at Chelsea and then Syon Park before it moved, in 2019, into a Victorian exhibition hall built for agricultural machinery. The relocation to Olympia changed the fair’s calendar, its scale and its audience in one move, and the strongest stands of the year, from a hand-finished brass sculpture to sixty-four suspended pendants, showed exactly what the new setting made possible.

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Decorex 2019 ran from 6 to 9 October at Olympia, London, the forty-first edition of a fair that has run every year since its founding in 1978. It was also the first edition held at Olympia at all. For the years before it, Decorex had been staged at Syon Park, the Duke of Northumberland’s west London estate, a set of temporary structures raised each year on parkland. In 2019 the fair moved into a permanent, purpose-built exhibition hall on Hammersmith Road, and the move changed more than the postcode.

The relocation also shifted Decorex out of September, when it had run alongside the London Design Festival, and into October, positioning the 2019 edition in the same week as PAD London and the run-up to Frieze London and Frieze Masters. That is a different audience and a different set of expectations, and it asked more of the exhibitors than a change of tent.

What follows is a look at four stands that answered that brief in very different ways, a sculptural brass pendant built from recycled metal, a furniture collection with glass insets inspired by the Californian desert, an Amsterdam studio’s first showing on English soil, and the lighting stand the fair itself singled out as its best design of the year, alongside the venue and the format that made room for all of them.

A relocation built to change what the fair could do

Olympia is not a neutral backdrop. The building on Hammersmith Road opened in 1885 as the National Agricultural Hall, designed by the architect Henry Edward Coe with James Edmeston, its Grand Hall and Pillar Hall built as one of the largest clear-span iron and glass structures in London at the time, on a scale closer to King’s Cross or Paddington than to a conventional exhibition venue. Both halls were given Grade II* listed status in 2003, recognising them as buildings of outstanding architectural interest, and it is that structure, not a marquee on a lawn, that Decorex moved into for 2019.

The practical case for the move was straightforward: Olympia sits on the District and Piccadilly lines in west Kensington, walkable from three London Underground stations, against a Thames-side estate reachable mainly by car or a dedicated shuttle bus. Decorex’s own organisers reported a ten per cent rise in visitor numbers for the 2019 edition, a figure they attributed directly to the change of venue. Easier to reach is also easier to visit twice, and a trade fair depends on repeat footfall from designers and specifiers more than it depends on a single dramatic first impression.

The October date did something else again. Held in September at Syon Park, Decorex had run inside London Design Festival week, competing for attention with dozens of concurrent design events across the city. Moved to October, the 2019 edition sat inside the same fortnight as PAD London and the build-up to Frieze London and Frieze Masters, London’s two flagship contemporary art fairs. That put Decorex, for the first time, inside the capital’s art-world calendar rather than only its design-festival calendar, an audience with different buying habits and a different appetite for one-off and collectible pieces, and it is a large part of why the fair’s Future Heritage platform, covered in full elsewhere, mattered as much in 2019 as it did.

Design Encounter and the platform for new talent

The centrepiece installation for 2019 was Design Encounter, a sequence of interconnected rooms conceived by the architect John Allsopp and realised in collaboration with six interior design studios, among them Natalia Miyar Atelier, Samantha Todhunter Design and Zachary Pulman. Rather than a single showcase, it was staged as a walk-through suite, each room handed to a different studio and furnished as a complete scheme, so that a visitor moved through a sequence of finished interiors rather than a static display of individual products.

Sitting alongside it was Future Heritage, the fair’s dedicated platform for emerging British makers, curated for 2019 by the applied arts and design critic Corinne Julius. It brought together a small group of ceramicists, silversmiths, jewellers and sculptors working in materials from porcelain to 3D-printed metal, each showing new, often one-off work rather than a production line. Future Heritage is a large enough story in its own right that it has its own dedicated coverage on this site, which sets out the makers and the platform’s purpose in full. What is worth noting here is how it sat inside the wider fair: a deliberate counterweight to the established brands on the main floor, and one of the clearest signs that the move to Olympia was about scale and range as much as square footage.

Cameron Design House brings sculpture into brass

Cameron Design House, the bespoke lighting and furniture company that hand-builds every chandelier in its St John’s Wood studio, used Decorex 2019 to introduce Kasvaa, a pendant built entirely from recycled brass. The brand describes the piece as taking its form from pollen, seed heads and flowers, an organic geometry that reads as abstract sculpture as readily as it reads as a light source, and it is designed to be installed three different ways, hung as a conventional pendant, suspended low among planting, or mounted on a podium as a freestanding object. That flexibility is unusual in lighting design, where a fixture is normally built for one fixed application, and it is the clearest sign of the brand’s own description of the piece as sitting on the boundary between sculpture and lighting rather than settling on one side of it.

Kasvaa’s material story matters as much as its form. Building the piece’s structure from one hundred per cent recycled brass, rather than from newly smelted metal, ties a labour-intensive, hand-finished object to a supply chain that does not depend on fresh mining, a detail easy to miss on a showroom floor but a real constraint on how the piece was engineered and finished. The design had already been proven outside the trade fair circuit earlier in 2019, appearing in the Morgan Stanley Garden, which won gold at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show that May, evidence that Kasvaa’s sculptural reading works as convincingly outdoors, against planting, as it does suspended in a room. Cameron Design House showed it at Decorex alongside the Haara chandelier and the Inari and Vesanto designs, an indication of how deep the brand’s catalogue of sculptural lighting had already grown by 2019.

Tom Faulkner’s Joshua Tree colourways

Tom Faulkner, the sculptural furniture designer who moved from hand-painted furniture into metalwork in the early 1990s, brought a new palette to Decorex 2019 under the name Butterfly, a set of multi-coloured finishes set with iridescent glass insets across the brand’s furniture. The colourway takes its reference from Joshua Tree National Park in California, translating the desert’s shifting light and mineral colour into glass that changes hue depending on the angle it is viewed from, set into forms built from the polished stainless steel and bronze that are the constants of the studio’s practice.

That contrast, a controlled, industrial base material carrying an unpredictable, light-reactive insert, sits squarely inside Faulkner’s own stated design principle of truth to materials, work with no applied ornament, where every visual effect has to come from the material itself rather than from paint or applied decoration. Iridescent glass is one of the few materials that can deliver genuine colour shift without a single drop of pigment, which is precisely why it suits a designer who has built a career on refusing to disguise what a piece is made of. The Butterfly colourway ran across several of the studio’s core collections at the fair, including the Papillon furniture range, the Lily cocktail tables, the Lexington nesting side tables, and the Cloud and Lexington mirrors, giving visitors a chance to see one material idea carried consistently across an entire furniture family rather than confined to a single showpiece.

Barn in the City’s first English showing

Barn in the City, the Amsterdam studio led by Nancy Torreele and Martijn van Rijn, brought its bespoke furniture practice to a London fair for 2019, showing three pieces built around colour and reflective surface: the Yves coffee table in electric blue, the Amber side table and the Chloé coffee table. The studio’s regular work spans high-end residential interiors and superyacht fit-outs, projects where every piece is made to measure for a specific room or vessel rather than produced as a standard run, and the pieces shown at Decorex carried that same one-off, client-facing logic even as standalone showpieces.

Amsterdam and London sit less than an hour apart by air, but a Dutch studio choosing Decorex as a stage for new work says something about how the fair’s 2019 audience had changed. A trade fair only draws exhibitors from outside its home market when it can promise them designers and specifiers worth the flight, and Barn in the City’s presence at Olympia, alongside its saturated colour and handcrafted joinery set against the established British and European names on the same floor, was itself a small piece of evidence for how far Decorex’s reach had grown by its move to the new venue.

Bert Frank’s best-designed stand

Bert Frank, the London lighting studio founded in 2013 by Robbie Llewellyn and Adam Yeats, took the award for best-designed stand at Decorex 2019, built around a signature installation of the studio’s Riddle pendant, sixty-four individual fixtures suspended together to form a single ceiling-filling composition rather than a scattered arrangement of separate lights. Alongside it the studio showed the Glaive chandelier and the Arbor wall light, both worked in the brass, marble and hand-finished metalwork that have defined the studio’s output since its founding.

Llewellyn and Yeats met working at Hector Finch, the London fixture studio, before setting up on their own, a background that shows directly in Bert Frank’s approach: Llewellyn trained in product design, Yeats had run a metal fabrication plant, and the combination produced a studio that designs and finishes its own pieces in England rather than outsourcing production. Sixty-four pendants hung as one composition is a considerable undertaking for any stand, requiring the installation to read as a single coherent object rather than as multiplied inventory, and the award recognised precisely that, a studio using scale and repetition to make a design argument rather than simply to fill space.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Decorex 2019 as simply a change of address, a fair swapping a marquee on parkland for a permanent hall closer to the Underground. The more accurate description is that the move to Olympia, and the shift from a September date to an October one, repositioned the entire fair, putting it inside the same week as London’s leading contemporary art fairs rather than only its design-festival calendar, and giving exhibitors a reason to bring work built for that audience.

Cameron Design House, Tom Faulkner, Barn in the City and Bert Frank answered that brief from four different directions, a sculptural pendant built from recycled brass, a furniture colourway drawn from a Californian desert, an Amsterdam studio’s first English showing, and sixty-four pendants engineered to read as a single object. None of them needed the new venue to make good work. What the venue gave them was a bigger, better-connected room to show it in, and 2019 was the year that room opened.

For a look at how the fair has developed since, Decorex 2025 covers the brands and stands from a more recent edition at the same venue.