Judging from the heightened sales activity on day one, the PAD crowd is as perky as ever. At day one of PAD, the Pavilion of Art and Design, in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square, sales were starting within minutes of the doors opening and by the end of day the best booths had sold a lot of the work on show. The limited-edition design sector, it seems, is in good health. A well-heeled crowd were snapping up jewels at Glenn Spiro (£90,000 upwards) or a highly collectible Judas table (1948) by the Danish designer Finn Juhl at Modernity set with 32 silver pieces and listed at £68,000. A disappointed American design advisor was told the bar cart at Rose Uniacke had sold instantly. “You just can’t get them in New York,” she said. “Everyone is after a bar cart. It’s a thing.” Or perhaps a sign of the times.
MAURICE MARTY
Meubles et Lumières
Maurice Marty is not one of the best-known names of his generation but the enormous sofa on show at the Parisian gallery Meubles et Lumières shows the scale of his thinking. “It was made in 1971 for an apartment in Paris’s 14th arrondissement,” explains the gallery owner Alexandre Goult, who had also had also obtained Marty’s drawing of the room for which it was designed. As tends to the case with 20th-century pieces the upholstery has been refreshed, in bouclé Dedar fabric similar to the original. The polymathic Marty—sculptor, painter, architect and designer of swinging 1970s nightclubs—is still working at 94 years old.
ALVAR AALTO
Rose Uniacke
Alvar Uniacke is skilled at both creating and representing the tastes of our times and the warm, woody Scandinavian furniture on her stand, mostly from the early to mid-20th century, is very much in fashion. A birch dining suite of a round table and four cantilevered chairs (Chair 21) by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was priced at £45,000. It had not come far. It had originally been acquired in 1930 by one F.E. McWilliam for their London home from Heal’s, who imported Aalto’s furniture to the UK.
CARLO BUGATTI
Sceners
The Parisian gallery Sceners got off to a good start. Showing at PAD for the first time they won the prize for best stand for a presentation that created clever dialogues between desirable pieces. “We are trying not to specialise in a particular period,” explained the creative director Jonathan Haddad of the mix of 1900s Carlo Bugatti furniture, 2006 Ron Arad and 1950s abstract artist Jean Degottex. A small desk and chair (£65,000) by Bugatti (father of the car designer) stood out for its plethora of details typical to the designer—parchment surfaces, bone inlay, silk fringing and finely carved wood all assembled with Japanese-level joinery.
TRISTANO DI ROBILANT
Tristan Hoare
You can currently see Tristano di Robilant’s work at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, where 12 of his glass sculptures are installed among the museum’s Venetian masterworks. Or you can buy a piece at PAD this week for around £8,000 to £15,000. “It’s very cerebral work,” says the gallerist Tristan Hoare, of the clear glassworks that make the very gentlest intervention into the space, including the curious Matryoshka-style composition shown here. Di Robilant works with the celebrated blower Andrea Zilio at Anfora on Murano. “It’s a very macho environment,” Hoare says, “and yet it yields such delicacy.”
MAX LAMB
Fumi
“Max Lamb is fascinated with materials, and seeing how far he can push them,” says Valerio Capo of London gallery Fumi.This year, the British designer has collaborated with the Stoke-on-Trent pottery 1882 Ltd to create a series of chairs in ceramic called Crockery. Fumi showed one in white. Last year, Lamb began to make furniture out of the cardboard he had collected in his workshop over many years, most of it packaging from delivered items. He transforms it into pulp by soaking it in a wheat paste and layers this into useable, if slightly fragile, furniture. The results, needless to say, do not come as cheap as the original material (price on application).
FELICITY AYLIEFF
Adrian Sassoon
In 2021, the British ceramist Felicity Aylieff was invited to show her work at Kew Gardens and three years later the work was ready. Now some of the towering pots she made for the exhibition are on show with Adrian Sassoon, one of them standing 180cm tall and alive with botanical decoration, hand-painted in Fencai enamel. Aylieff is continuing the tradition of the large pot—a symbol of status in imperial China. “It takes four throwers to make each of the six sections,” explains Sassoon. The price tag is also large at £55,000.
