London’s Coolest Designers Are Creating Recycled Furniture for the Ace Hotel

Ready Made Go, a London Design Festival exhibition now in its third year, has always walked a fine line between the conceptual and the commercial. Curated by Laura Houseley of Modern Design Review, the brief has always been for designers to devise an object, sculpture, or piece of furniture that might actually be used by the exhibition’s host — the Ace Hotel London Shoreditch. Over the years, that brief has yielded everything from a door handle by Philippe Malouin and an ashtray by Tomás Alonso, to more fantastical elements like the gradient climbing wall Patternity created for the hotel gym or the volcano-shaped Jesmonite sculpture by Hilda Hellström that presides over its restaurant.

This year, the focus is on sustainability, and the new pieces are some of our favorites to date: extruded, recycled polymer sculptures by James Shaw; a flecked, terrazzo-like stool by Michael Marriott, who used Smile Plastics, a material made from recycled food packaging; dovetail-jointed tables by Soft Baroque, made from a silicastone product composed of recycled glass TV parts and ceramic sinks; salt and pepper grinders by Oscar Diaz; and ceramic mugs and coffee pots by Ian McIntyre. See the products below, or, if you’re in the area, stop by the hotel anytime before September 30 to experience the pieces in action.