Material Matters: Grant Gibson reflects on his popular design fair, about to open at LDF 2025

Design fair Material Matters returns to London Design Festival (LDF) 2025 for its fourth edition (17-21 September). From its new location, the 1960s Space House, the fair promises its traditional mix of leading brands and emerging material explorations.

The initiative started out as a popular design podcast during lockdown, and developed into a fringe event that quickly piqued the design industry's curiosity. Fast-forward a couple of years, and Material Matters is a key feature of LDF, recently made its first outing in Copenhagen, during 3 Days of Design 2025, and is staging a series of pop-up events, including a bookshop that ran in early September, and a conference, planned for November 2025.

Earlier this summer, Wallpaper* sat down with founder (and podcast host) Grant Gibson to chat about Material Matters, where it came from and where it's going. Here, he shares more about the making of the fair, the new material explorations he's excited about, and why we should be keeping the material conversation alive.

Grant Gibson on Material Matters

Wallpaper*: Material Matters started as a podcast: can you tell us more about the idea and its early days?

Grant Gibson: I've been a design journalist and magazine editor for many years, but as people stopped reading magazines, I felt like I was in a position where I'd spent quite a few years fundamentally managing decline. And when I left Crafts Magazine, which I edited for over a decade, I needed something else to do. I wanted to create something that was bigger than me, and I needed to do that on a budget. I thought there was probably a market for a podcast, and so I recorded six episodes with people like Bill Amberg, Edmund de Waal, Celia Pym, with no great expectations. I put them out all together and realised it caused a bit of a ripple, and that, probably, there was an audience for this. This was 2019.

I spent a year going to people’s studios, and then Covid hit and people were at home, looking for things to do, or listen to. And at the same time, we discovered Zoom, among other things, and I realised that suddenly I could talk to designers, artists, makers, architects, scientists from across the globe, which was quite liberating.

W*: Why did you decide to focus on materials?

GG: I liked this notion of having a thread that ran through the interviews, rather than just a set of random interviews, it seemed like a sensible way to go. I started out with craftspeople and I was looking for something that wasn't overtly about sustainability, because it was becoming, even by that stage, really quite a tricky word, and people would start unpicking it. And I wanted some wriggle room, so I developed the conversations into the larger sphere of material intelligence. So if I wanted to interview John Barnard, the F1 designer who pioneered the use of carbon fibre in many ways, I could do that.

W*: How have conversations around materials evolved in the six years you've done the podcast, but then also since you've worked more in depth on the topic through the fair?

GG: I think it has become more mainstream. We have an installation this year in the fair, which is a follow-up from last year, called ‘In the Making’, curated by [architecture practice] TP Bennett in a partnership with The Furniture Practice, for example. And these are major companies, who are concerned with the environment and their impact upon it, looking at materials as a way to mitigate their impact. And up to a point, that's almost becoming more important than form. As an example, it seems like many of the contract and office furniture companies are in the process of thinking beyond the office and thinking about their wider impact on society, and they're doing that through materials.

W*: What did you learn in six years of doing the podcast?

GG: What struck me about doing the podcast is exactly this. It started very much as a series of conversations about craft. But then I expanded the scope because suddenly there was this realisation that materials touch every single part of our lives. And that can be on a macro scale; I did a podcast on the Grenfell Tower disaster, for example, and how aluminium composite material ended up cladding that building. But it can also be on the micro scale, and I have had many very intimate conversations with creatives over the years. I think the joy of doing the podcast is that you get these stories on different scales, all filtered through the prism of materials, which is really fascinating. As a society, we've lost touch with materials, with how things are made, and their value. And what we try to do on the podcast and in the fair is to explain why they matter, why they're important.

W*: The Materials Matter fair is a unique expansion of your concept that has become so successful, growing when many fairs were declining. How did the opportunity to evolve the podcast into a fair happen?

GG: Quite quickly, I realised that I'd created something close to a brand (I am cautious using that word), something that people were interested in. So the question was how to expand it, and make a living out of it. I'd known the person who became my business partner, William Knight, since the mid-1990s. We first met when he was at Design Council – he went on to become deputy director of the London Design Festival, and also a director of 100% Design, so he knew how to make events. It made sense to join forces and launch an event, get a space and fill it with worthwhile stuff, and the podcast gave it this kind of philosophical underpinning.

We didn’t want it to be in a large shed out of town, because people don't want to go to those kinds of places so much anymore. So we looked for a space, which is not straightforward in London, because it's been gentrified to within an inch of its life. So we found Bargehouse [at OXO Tower] in 2020, and year one was about proving that we could do it, which we did. And then we built on it, until it became clear it was something worth exporting, which is when the Copenhagen edition happened.

W* What should we expect for Material Matters 2025?

GG: The main news is our venue, Space House. It's a 1960s building by Richard Seifert, the architect best known for Centre Point. It's quite an extraordinary space; there's a lot of natural light coming in.

In terms of exhibitors, we have a mix of people coming back and new exhibitors. We’ll have ‘In the Making’ [as mentioned]. The Wood Awards will be showing their shortlist of the best buildings and products in wood. We've got a new installation from The Only Natural Design Competition, which encourages students to think about using materials such as hemp.

We have brands like Hydro and 3M, and exhibitors include MycoWorks, exploring the potential of mycelium, and then a variety of smaller designers and makers working in waste or pine resin, all sorts of new and different materials. It’s great to have a variety of people, from those working on a smaller scale, in a small studio or even at a kitchen table, to global brands.

W*: You obviously spent the past several years pretty much immersed in materials. What are the current trends?

GG: It's a bit of a cliché, but we've got quite a lot of mycelium going on. And one of the most interesting examples we've got in the fair is called Filie Materials, a leather alternative made from the plastic film taken from broken car windscreens. The two big strands that come through in the fair and the podcast are biomaterials (hemp is a big favourite, increasingly), but also waste and people doing things with waste in different ways.

Material Matters, 17-20 September
Space House, 1 Kemble St (Kingsway), London WC2B 4AN