Collectible Design · London
Reading time: 7 minThe third edition of Gallery FUMI‘s summer exhibition turns a Hay Hill townhouse into a house by the sea: volcanic stone, sun-bleached plaster and bright jolts of colour, with Max Lamb, Voukenas Petrides and a cast of makers at their most tactile.
There is a particular pleasure in walking off the noise of Berkeley Square, up the short incline of Hay Hill, and into a room that has quietly decided it is somewhere else entirely. That is the trick Gallery FUMI has pulled off this summer with Casa al Mare — “house by the sea” — the third edition of what has become one of the most reliably charming fixtures in the London design calendar. Step through the door and Mayfair recedes; in its place is the pale, salted, sunlit hush of a Mediterranean island, conjured not with props or postcards but with objects, materials and light.
It is a themed group show, and I confess I usually approach those with a raised eyebrow, because the theme so often does the heavy lifting that the work should be doing. Not here. Casa al Mare wears its concept lightly, as an atmosphere rather than a costume, and the result is a show you want to linger in — the rare exhibition that makes you slow your pace and reach out, half-consciously, to touch things you know you shouldn’t.
A gallery that has always backed the maker
To understand why Casa al Mare feels so assured, it helps to know a little about the gallery staging it. FUMI was established in 2008 by Sam Pratt and Valerio Capo, opening first in Shoreditch — then the natural habitat of anyone doing something interesting and slightly ungovernable — before eventually settling into its present home on Hay Hill, at the heart of Mayfair’s growing cluster of collectible design. Over the better part of two decades, Pratt and Capo have built the gallery on a simple but demanding premise: that design can be as conceptually and aesthetically audacious as art, provided it is made properly.
That word — made — is the key to the whole enterprise. FUMI’s designers tend to be makers in the fullest sense, producing objects by hand in small workshops using techniques that would be recognisable to a craftsperson of a century ago: carving, glassblowing, cabinetry, lacquering, patient hand assembly. The gallery commissions exclusive, low-volume, limited-edition work, and it has earned a reputation for the very personal touch it brings to selection and curation. You feel that touch immediately in Casa al Mare. This is not a scattergun summer group show; it is a considered gathering, each piece chosen for the way it holds the light and the theme.
That instinct has been sharpened over years of an ambitious exhibition programme run alongside a presence at the international design fairs, where FUMI has become a familiar and respected name. The summer show is now a tradition in its own right — a moment when the gallery loosens its collar slightly, chooses a mood rather than a manifesto, and lets its designers play. Casa al Mare began as a simple, seductive idea — the house by the sea — and has matured, over three editions, into something more interesting: a recurring meditation on how good design can carry the feeling of a place. This year’s decision to root that feeling in the Aeolian Islands gives the familiar format a fresh and specific charge.
The Aeolian Islands, distilled
This year the curation looks to the Aeolian Islands — that volcanic scatter off the north coast of Sicily where the land is black rock and the light does extraordinary things over still water. It is an inspired reference point, because the Aeolians are all about material contrast: hard stone and soft haze, mineral weight and sun-bleached lightness. Rather than illustrate the islands, the show distils them, drawing out a palette of volcanic greys, chalky whites, sand and bone, punctuated here and there by a jolt of colour as bright and sudden as a painted fishing boat.
Everything gathered here shares an attentiveness to raw material, surface and weight. Stone, gypsum, wood, ceramic, metal and glass are each handled with the craft and restraint that a Mediterranean context seems to call for — nothing shouts, nothing is over-finished, and the effect is cumulative. Walk the room and you begin to read it less as a display of individual objects than as the furnishing of an imaginary summer house, one you would happily never leave.
The works, and the makers behind them
Central to this year’s presentation are the works of Voukenas Petrides, and they are, for me, the emotional heart of the show. The studio — the furniture designer Andreas Voukenas and the architect Steven Petrides, working between New York and Athens — hand-fabricates everything in its Athens workshop, and its trademark is a pairing of stone and gypsum: one dense and enduring, the other soft, powdery, polished to an almost marble-like calm. That tension between the geological and the tender feels utterly right for a show inspired by volcanic islands, and there is a Greek clarity to their sense of proportion that anchors the whole room.
Then comes the colour. Max Lamb — one of the most quietly influential British designers of his generation, and a FUMI collaborator since the gallery’s earliest days — presents work from his Scrap Poly series, shown this year in tones that slip neatly into the sun-bleached palette. Lamb’s method is one of my favourite stories in contemporary design: he builds these forms from stacked, hand-cut blocks of expanded polystyrene — often offcuts hoarded over years of working with the material — then seals the irregular, textured mass under a glossy polyurethane skin that pulls the whole thing into a single, coherent, oddly monumental object. It is humble material treated with total seriousness, and it never fails to make me smile.
This is not a show about the sea so much as a show about how the sea makes you look — slower, softer, more alert to the weight of a stone and the warmth of a wall.
Sam Orlando Miller contributes mirror works, and they are the show’s moments of shimmer. Miller, a British artist who has long worked from Le Marche in Italy, builds his mirrors from handmade glass that he silvers by hand, adding patina and painterly marks so that each surface carries the depth and mystery of an old fresco. He cites the naturalism, symbolism and formal clarity of Italian Renaissance painting, but the language is entirely his own — faceted, abstract, alive with colour. Against FUMI’s pale walls, they read like windows onto some brighter, deeper elsewhere.
For sheer tactile pleasure, it is hard to beat Tuomas Markunpoika’s contributions — a coffee table, console and chair rendered in tadelakt, the traditional Moroccan lime plaster, polished here to a warm, sandy finish that varies subtly in tone across each surface. The Amsterdam-based Finn is a designer preoccupied with memory and materiality, and his forms are rounded and unhurried, carrying a lovely “hard-soft” ambiguity: they look as though they should be heavy, yet they seem to hold the light like something weightless. Run your eye along an edge and you can almost feel the warmth of a plastered wall at the end of a hot day.
Around these anchors, a generous cast extends the show’s material range in every direction: Carlès & Demarquet, Casey McCafferty, Allan Collins, Bregje Sliepenbeek, Emma Witter — whose ethereal sculptures from natural waste were the subject of a memorable FUMI solo — Jie Wu, the Swedish glass artist Simon Klenell, Saelia Aparicio, the British duo JAMESPLUMB, Jeremy Anderson, Francesco Perini and Study O Portable. Between them they carry the show from glass and ceramics through to textile and wood, and it is a mark of the curation that this breadth never tips into clutter. Each piece earns its place in the house by the sea.
Part of the achievement is how naturally these very different hands sit together. Klenell’s glass catches the same coastal light that plays across Miller’s mirrors; Witter’s pale, bone-fine constructions rhyme with the chalk of the gypsum and the powder of the tadelakt; the carved and the cast, the blown and the assembled, all seem to be describing the same imagined coastline from different angles. It is the kind of coherence that only comes from a gallery that knows its makers intimately — that can see, before the pieces are ever in a room together, how a Greek plaster form will speak to a Finnish plastered table and a lump of British polystyrene painted the colour of a summer sky.
Why it matters
What Casa al Mare captures so well is something collectible design does better than almost any other field: the idea that an object made slowly, by hand, from honest material can carry as much feeling as a painting. There is nothing precious about the way FUMI presents it — the show is warm, generous and genuinely inviting — but there is real rigour underneath the ease. These are limited editions and unique pieces by some of the most interesting makers working today, gathered under a theme that lets each one breathe.
It is also, frankly, a joy simply to be in. In a summer city that can feel relentless, a room that asks you to slow down, look harder and think about weight, surface and light is its own small holiday. You leave having gone nowhere, and yet somewhere.
Casa al Mare is on view from 25 June to 29 August 2026 at Gallery FUMI, 2–3 Hay Hill, London W1J 6AS. Admission is free.
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