Inside the Collectors’ Lounge at Collect 2026: A Library Tola Ojuolape Had Already Built Once, on a Screen

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 7 min

Tola Ojuolape Studio built the Collectors’ Lounge at Collect 2026 around the idea of a maker’s library, a space where craft objects are lived with rather than simply viewed. Fourteen months earlier, in a video for Dezeen and Trimble SketchUp, Ojuolape had already designed almost exactly that library, on a screen, for a different site entirely.

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Introduction

The Collectors’ Lounge occupied a corner of Somerset House’s West Wing throughout Collect 2026, the Crafts Council‘s fair for contemporary craft and design, running from 27 February to 1 March. It was designed by Tola Ojuolape Studio, the London multidisciplinary practice led by Tola Ojuolape, and commissioned by Trimble SketchUp, the 3D-modelling software used across architecture and interior design, which sponsored Collect 2026 and collaborated on the Lounge’s own digital design phase.

The brief, as Ojuolape has described it, was to build a space where craft is lived with rather than simply viewed, reimagining a maker’s library as an immersive environment built directly into the room’s own architecture. Materials and artworks were worked into the walls and fittings themselves instead of displayed as separate pieces on plinths against them, a distinction that shows up in how the room actually reads: the craft is not sitting inside the space, it is the space.

A maker’s library, built from the show’s own materials

The Lounge’s structure ran on pistachio-green acoustic panels, made from recycled-content wood wool by the Stockholm manufacturer Baux, doubling as both sound-dampening surface and ad hoc display plinth for the craft objects set against them. Wood wool itself is a composite of wood fibre, cement and water, sourced from managed forests in Österbymo in southern Sweden, chosen for the room specifically because it absorbs sound, carries an A-Class fire rating and releases no measurable dust or particles into a space full of people standing close to glass and ceramics for four days straight. A corner bar area was marked off with voile, a sheer textile from the Dutch manufacturer Vescom, dividing the compact footprint into distinct zones without a single solid wall. Seating throughout was upholstered in a camel tone from Sunbury Fabrics, a warmer counterpoint to the panels’ cooler green, and glass artworks were positioned specifically to catch and redirect the West Wing’s own natural light rather than relying on installed spotlighting.

The choices add up to a specific design position rather than a decorating scheme: every material in the room was picked for reuse or recyclability, and the whole structure was built lightweight enough to be dismantled and moved on rather than built for a single four-day run and then discarded. A fair environment is, by definition, temporary, and Ojuolape’s Lounge treated that temporariness as a design constraint to solve rather than an excuse to build disposably.

The makers chosen for the room itself

Ojuolape selected work from British, Brazilian and Irish makers for the space, each one already showing elsewhere at Collect or beyond it. Louis Thompson, a London glassmaker who completed his master’s at the Royal College of Art in 2011 and has since held residencies at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, the Glazenhuis Museum in Belgium and Soneva Art Glass in the Maldives, with work in the Victoria and Albert Museum‘s own collection, had pieces positioned in the Lounge alongside Peter Layton, founder of London Glassblowing, both working with the room’s daylight rather than installed spotlighting. Layton’s inclusion arrived in the same year his own studio marks fifty years since its 1976 founding in Rotherhithe.

JIG Studio, the Brazilian design gallery and platform contributing the room’s fourth material voice, had itself only opened five months earlier, on 16 October 2025 during Frieze Art Fair, founded by the London architect Richard Penman, whose past work includes projects for Issey Miyake and Stella McCartney, and the Brazilian-born design strategist Grace Nemeth. Nemeth has described the gap the studio was built to close plainly: “Brazil is a hotbed of design talent, incredibly underrepresented in the UK and Europe.” JIG’s own Soho space opened with more than thirty-five works across textiles, wood, ceramics and mixed media, most of them never previously shown in Europe, which makes its presence in the Collectors’ Lounge one of its first public outings beyond its own two-storey home on Lexington Street. Taken together, the four names in the room span a fifty-year British studio, a museum-collected glassmaker mid-career, a five-month-old Brazilian gallery and an Irish artist working entirely in reclaimed plastic. The spread of age, geography and material holds together for one reason: every maker in the room was chosen for material handled with enough intention that Ojuolape could put it within arm’s reach rather than behind glass.

The Irish artist Helen O’Shea, based in Cork, showed Bloom, a sculptural textile piece measuring 44 by 34 by 24 centimetres, built entirely from reused HDPE plastic, much of it collected from beaches and cut, pinned, glued and stitched into form using cotton thread and domestic sewing pins. O’Shea’s practice grew out of a 2015 residency in Iceland, where she watched waste fish skins being converted into leather, and her sculptures since have worked the same premise in plastic: objects that read, in her own words, as “a fictional cross between plastic and organic life.” Bloom sits inside a room built almost entirely from recycled and reclaimed material, which is either a coincidence or the most literal possible argument for why O’Shea’s work belonged there specifically rather than in a general craft selection.

She designed this exact library once before, on a screen

In December 2024, more than a year before Collect 2026 opened, Ojuolape appeared in a Dezeen and Trimble SketchUp video demonstrating 3D-modelling techniques by designing a virtual library for Clerkenwell, the London neighbourhood where she built her career. That library ran across three levels connected by a spiral staircase: a ground floor for reading, with brick shelving that displayed book covers rather than spines to draw people in; a first floor for making and learning, divided by sheer curtains into spaces that could be reconfigured for workshops; and a second floor for pausing, with stepped seating built around a skylight. “Having a sense of place is incredibly important,” Ojuolape said of the project at the time, explaining why she had picked a neighbourhood with its own history of makers and foundries rather than a generic site.

No source covering the Collectors’ Lounge appears to have noticed that this is the second time Ojuolape and Trimble SketchUp have built a maker’s library together, or that the underlying concept, a space organised around reading, making and living with craft rather than simply storing it, survived the jump from a speculative video demonstration to a real, load-bearing installation at a major fair. The Clerkenwell library used sheer curtains to divide a workshop floor; the Collectors’ Lounge used sheer voile to divide a bar. The first project separated “read and stay” from “make and learn” across three storeys; the second compressed the same instinct, objects to look at, objects to sit among, a distinct zone to gather in, into a single corner of Somerset House. It is the same design brief, tested first where nothing needed to physically stand up, then built for real.

Tola Ojuolape’s own route to a corner of Somerset House

Ojuolape is of Nigerian heritage, raised in County Clare, Ireland, and trained across Ireland, Milan and London before founding her own studio, which now works across interiors, branding and furniture rather than confining itself to a single discipline. Her practice has taken on cultural commissions alongside private interiors, including a project for the Africa Centre in London, and her Collect 2026 installation was not an isolated fair appearance but one entry in a run of recent work that has put her studio in front of a wider audience: a Dezeen Awards shortlisting for Emerging Interior Designer in 2023, after which she went on to judge the same award, and a place in House & Garden‘s Next in Design list in 2025.

She is also one of Martyn White’s own Design 100 selections, entry number 56, cited there specifically for a London studio spanning interiors, branding and furniture, and for the same Dezeen shortlisting and House & Garden recognition that mark her out elsewhere. The Collectors’ Lounge is the first piece of coverage on this site to catch her actually building the argument that selection was made on.

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Final thoughts

The easy version of this story is a fair sponsor commissioning a designer to build an attractive lounge, and on the day, that is exactly what the Collectors’ Lounge was. Set against a video Ojuolape made fourteen months earlier with the same technology partner, though, it reads as something more specific: a designer given the rare chance to build, at full scale and with real objects, a concept she had already proven out on a screen. Most speculative design work stays speculative. This one got a corner of Somerset House, a set of glass by a man marking fifty years in the trade, a gallery five months into its own first public season, and a sculpture built from beach plastic, and it turned out to still be the same library. Collect has rewarded that kind of persistence before: at Collect 2023, the fair gave a former underwater photographer room to grow a sculpture from a wheatgrass root rather than shape one.