London Design Festival 2008
LDF: the Bombay Sapphire prize
London Design Festival 2008
Tony Chambers calls me the Condee Rice of Wallpaper, and although I question the politics, I rather like the sentiment and certainly clock up the air miles (offsetting my carbon residue as I go). I was off to be Condee today in two locations, at polar opposite ends of London and I may as well have flown to New York for the amount of time it took me to cross the capital. This is the problem with Design Week. It should be called Pan London, since some days, if not well organised, six hours can be spent on public transport negotiating the city’s traffic in two directions twice, like today.
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In an attempt to speed up the process I had a car waiting to take me east at first light - having scooped up the debris from our dinner the previous evening - and ploughed through traffic to pick up my running mate for the day, Arik Levy. He had come to London primarily to help judge the Bombay Sapphire glass prize and to award the winner that evening. A fellow judge, I had promised the organisers to accompany him, since we have lost VIPs in the past; even the local Tom Dixon turned up at the wrong location two years ago (Earls Court as opposed to Truman Brewery).
Arik was waiting at his hotel, St. Martin’s Lane ('small rooms but central,' he says with his typical Taurean sensibility) and we managed to have a good talk in the car, which took over an hour to reach the destination. We agreed that the Bombay prize was very worthy but actually quite a lot of money – £10,000 for 1st prize and nowt for the runner up. Perhaps it should be split somehow. What if, say, the Thai entry would win, said Arik, ‘He could buy a house.’ I said it may turn out to be the Swedish or, say, UK entry and if the latter was London-based might just fund rental of a workshop for a month or two. Either way, it would be a great leg up for the winner.
On arrival we given paper-cup coffee followed by the ubiquitous morning ‘perfect’ gin-based martini, necessary for us to understand the way the glass has to work – stems help to keep the liquor cool, too much warmth and it is all over. We learned about the size of measures and the social aspect of drinking (we thought we had enough experience of this but listened intently nonetheless) and the history of the brand – all of which were to be considered. Marcus Fairs of Dezeen, darling of the industry and a bit of a one-man-band, arrived a little late but not too late to watch the cocktail maker. He had come by bus, as Marcus would, the Che Guevara of London design week.
So I watched and participated as Che, Arik, and qualified glass experts meandered around the entries. Twenty-one countries were represented and all national entries were of a high standard. But the point was the brief. In essence the global winner had to be successful in all criteria including functionality, innovation and to be ‘on brand’.
Many were very strong entries (these are the winners already of between 200 and 700 entries per country) and all entrants young. The people’s choice from an online vote (both Wallpaper and Dezeen had promoted this in the past few weeks) was a splendid entry from Switzerland, which looked like topography. In fact it was entitled Topography and cleverly incorporated the Bombay logo on its base which left a mark on a drinks mat when wet. Very cute but quite heavy. We voted this third. In second place came the piece a couple of the judges, Che and Arik, really liked, the French entry, which was a fabulous and seductive, cascading collection of glasses dancing on a pole. Alas, this eventually lost out to, oh yes, the Thai entry, due to its title and inspiration – The French affair was inspired by Monet’s Lilies which had little to do with the brand. Design-wise it was a very close call though.
The Thai entry was splendid and filled the brief. A simple but exquisite cocktail glass, slightly asymmetrical with a stem of sorts, a cube with cut shards, which represented mineral becoming liquid. On brand, we all thought, and very well resolved design wise. We left, our secret safe until the evening’s awards ceremony. ‘He’s gonna buy a house,’ re-iterated Arik adding, ‘wish I had ten thou’ a few years back.’ Well, I don’t think he is suffering now (his Rocks and Fractal Cloud, I pointed out, were rather respectably sitting at Phillips waiting for their auction on Thursday with a reserve of around 10 thou’ each). Condee found a cab, Che took the bus.
The taxi sped the entire breadth of London, to Earl’s Court for the Wallpaper design seminar where I was chairing the discussion ‘What Price Design’ (any price, it turned out). We were all a tad late but so were the organisers since there were so many technical presentations to sort out. I handed my brand new Sony Ericsson Xperia to Alexander Hinnerskov from Fredrikson Stallard’s studio, and delighted to be in such company (the phone I mean), he snapped away from the front row.
I sat on the podium with Francis Sultana from David Gill Galleries to my left, followed by Ian Stallard and Patrik Fredrikson of Fredrikson Stallard (their sculpture this year adorns the Festival’s central arena, Somerset House), Craig Allen from Linley (Craig has taken over much of David’ responsibilities there now: David is Chairman of Christie’s auction house and somewhat busier), and my omnipresent Arik. I introduced the theme, concentrating on the value of editions in the design market place offering more prosaic comments about mass manufacture, and we were away. Each guest presented his case using images and Craig used a film. Did our guests do art or design we postured. Ian Stallard gruesomely pointed out that if their red poured rug was art it would be real blood.
Back in the car to shlepp east for the Bombay presentation - which was elegant and well-organised - to witness the very happy winner, whose speech began, developed and ended: ‘thank you, thank you, thank you thank you, thank you thank you, thank you.’ He was over the moon and a really lovely fella. Then we sped into the night to join guerrilla curator Libby Sellers at her Beau Sauvage exhibition at Liberty. It was a super party, with lashings of champagne and lovely pieces by Max Fraser, among others. Her stable of designers were present and there were other very welcome party guests including architect and the insiders’ heroine Sevil Peach. I could finally relax and for a moment stopped being Condee, retiring relatively early as others moved on to Zaha’s.
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