Famille Summerbelle

My picks from Tent London

We're back home, happy and exhausted from our week in London. We've been part of Tent in East London which is part of London's Design Week. The show was a great success, and I think this year the work on display was truly impressive. I have selected a few of my picks below.

It was the first time we exhibited at the show and we were really excited to be part of it. We had very positive reactions for the new products that we were showing (wallpaper, tea towels, tapes and laser cut of Paris, London and NYC).

Alp is a design studio led by swiss born, London based interior architect Annick L Petersen.

Roussel is an innovative British design and manufacturing brand created by 2 brothers Anthony and Benjamin Roussel. All Roussel designs are British made, sourcing the skills of some of the finest craftsmen. Presented here are the Louis reading lamp and Ligne stools.

Count on Me chair by Cyprus designer Eva Korae.

Sarah Newman from Design Bark, hand screen print bright colours and funky shapes on wood veneer to create stunning lampshades.

I loved the Origamis Hunter lampshades from Sistudio. They were designed by Chilean Industrial Designer Verónica Posada.

Hand made ceramic cups and saucers by Yasmin Dilekkaya and Ming Wai Sun. The pair studied together and decided to create Yas-Ming Ceramics after they graduated from the University for the Creative Arts in Rochester.

Beautiful ceramics designed by Bodo Sperlein for the Japanese Nikko company.

More picks will follow...

It will be very warm this weekend in Paris so we're going to drive to the seaside in Normandie and make sand castles with the children!
Enjoy your weekend.

Famille Summerbelle at Tent London

I'm off to London tomorrow to set up our stand at Tent design show at the Truman Brewery in East London.

Tent London is one of the largest design trade shows taking place during the London Design Festival each September.
Tent London presents over 200 international exhibitors, showing the very latest in contemporary interior products - furniture, lighting, ceramics, textiles, materials and accessories

The show is open to trade, press, public and students so if you are in the area come to say hello. We'd love to meet you! We will be in Hall 1, stand F20.

Here are some images of our new products presented at Tent: Un Dimanche à Paris wallpaper, tea towels, tapes, new colours for the City maps and laser cuts of Paris, London and NYC!

The show starts on Thursday 23rd, ends on Sunday 25th September.

If you can't make it to the show we will be launching our new products soon on our website...

Adonde

Parisian label Adonde mixes natural material with bright colours and the results are striking. I love the small faceted cardboard basket to empty all the little bits on your desk.

Y'a Pas Le Feu Au Lac

The name of the company Y'a Pas Le Feu Au Lac, is based on a French expression, means “no need to rush”. The company arose from the meeting between husband and wife team Grégory and Marie BODEL and FX Balléry, designer (graduate from the Royal College of Art).

Their passion for creation, their love of wood as well as their Jura origins (The Jura is located on the East part of France) gathered them around a common project: to create a French brand of wooden contemporary, useful and elegant objects and small pieces of furniture.

Snedker Studio

On Friday I went to visit Maison & Objet (the international trade show for interior design and home accessories) in the north of Paris. The show is spread over 8 massive halls and you need at least 2 full days to cover the whole event.
Over the next week or so I will show you my selection of designers/products that really caught my eyes.

Today I will start with Danish designer Pernille Snedker Hansen from Snedker studio. She presented Marbelous Wood at the show. She uses the old technique of marbling giving wood a supernatural, organic, colorful and vibrant pattern. Each board is made by hand and you can order Marbelous Wood for the grand floor design or the vibrant wall display in your interior project or private home.

You can also purchase one-off marbling prints hand printed by Pernille Snedker Hansen.

La braderie de Lille

We just spent a fantastic weekend in Lille, celebrating our wedding anniversary and visiting the Braderie de Lille.

For those that don't know, the Braderie is an enormous flea market festival dating back to the 12th Century that takes over the entire city. It's the largest in Europe.

It is a fabulous mix of antique furniture, objet d'art, bric a brac and ephemera. The whole event has a wonderful festival spirit - which even a little rain this morning failed to dampen.

Every festival in France has - as you might expect - a gastronomic backbone, and what I love is that it is always so proudly regional. The Braderie is no exception with every restaurant, cafe and bar turning over the regular menu to serve solely Moules Frites (mussels and fries) accompanied by the finest local and Belgian beers. Stacks of mussel shells form impromptu art installations within the main eating quarters.

The surprise of the weekend was to find just how beautiful this city is. It's the fourth largest in France (behind Paris, Lyon and Marseilles) and has a medieval history. The architecture shows the best of this part of Europe - tall houses with shutters and iron features (similar to Holland and Belgium) with many cobbled roads called pavé (which remind me so much of the famous cycling races of this region!). Today, Lille is a very popular university city, so the population is young and there really creative feel about the place.

Our top 5 things about Lille :

1. Of course the Braderie, which you really must put in your calendar to visit at least once!
2. Meert. We had a late breakfast lunch in this fantastic shop/cafe/restaurant.
3. The beautiful houses in the Vieux Lille (that's old town Lille). Charles de Gaulle was born here (his home is now a museum).
4. Le Merveilleux, home of the best chocolate/meringue combo you'll ever taste.
5. The moules-frites and beer. You'll definitely reach your limit by the end, but it's fun to enjoy this local tradition - the beers really are wonderful, if a little strong!

There were so many things that we didn't get to see: the Vielle Bourse, local parks and the neighbouring Roubaix to name a few, but we'll definitely be back here again one day very soon.

La Rentrée

I spent a part of the summer holidays, in our family home in the South West of France, discovering old boxes full of precious family collections. While rifling through an old wooden box I found a stunning collection of old Paris Match magazines dating between 1950 and 1970!

I found this wonderful illustration from the 1960s which gently mocks the French tradition of holidays; Parisians stuck in endless traffic jams following their neighbours across the country to arrive back in Paris for La Rentrée.

There is no specific equivalent English word for 'rentrée'....a tradition so firmly French, best described as the start of the year - when we return from the long French holidays, refreshed and enthused to recommence work and for our children to start the new school year.

Oh, and thankfully now we have wonderful Autoroutes (motorways)!