KLC School of Design Competition

Martyn White Designs is part of the judging panel for this year's KLC School of Design competition, hosted in partnership with Lombok.

Lombok have teamed up with KLC School of Design to help the next generation of designers gain industry insight and experience by launching a competition where their Product Innovation team task second-year students to design items of furniture as part of a new Lombok furniture collection. I had the great pleasure of being invited to join the judging panel to narrow down the designs to just three final candidates to go to the public vote. 

The brief was to draw on Lombok’s Eastern heritage and design an upholstered piece of furniture along with a coordinating side table or coffee table. The students were challenged to think about the technical restraints of developing and manufacturing a furniture collection while ensuring the pieces could be commercial. After meeting our Head of Product Design, the students had just one week to produce their initial design concepts ready for the judges. 

After a fantastic morning with the fellow judges, we managed to narrow down the designs to three shortlisted finalists, whose work is displayed below.
 

Laos Collection by Xenia Werle

Xenia’s design was inspired by the Colonial style of Asia. To represent and preserve the beauty of the south-eastern influence, the proposed design aims to add elegant heritage to the Lombok collection. 

The Bloom Collection by Jemma Busby

Jemma’s inspiration for her design stems from an innate desire to explore and experience the natural world. Encapsulating the fundamentals of the Lombok range, Jemma’s design aims to translate organic forms into something tangible that can be enjoyed in the home each day.

The Shroom by Kristiana Koseva

Kristiana’s design has been inspired by clusters of mushrooms often discovered on trees, and the beautiful layered effects that they can create. This has been implemented into the design through a simplified geometric pattern and round layered frame. The properties of mushrooms can also be felt through the colours and textures of the cork and wool.  

With guidance from Lombok’s Product Innovation team, the winner will develop their concepts into designs that can be put into production, travelling to Portugal to oversee their furniture being made at Lombok's workshop.

Voting is open to the public from Monday 28th January until Thursday 14th February, online and in Lombok's Tottenham Court Road Showroom.