P L A N T P O T 2 0 1 6

What a week! London Design Festival has been a blast. The Islington Design District has grown and flourished and I've launched my own pattern collection - Lizzie for SMUG. But the star of the show (if Instagram likes are anything to go by), has to be  P L A N T  P O T . 

It's been my absolute pleasure, after the great success of the exhibition last year, to bring back  P L A N T  P O T  for London Design Festival 2016. This time with the theme 'Pattern'. As you may remember from last year,  P L A N T  P O T  is a collection of 12 one-off plant pots designed and made by friends of SMUG. I commission each designer to produce a plant pot using any material of their choice. The only guidelines being that it must fit on a 12cm deep shelf, hold a plant and, this year, that their design should include pattern in some way. After selecting the designers and waiting patiently for the pots to start arriving at SMUG (always such a treat), it's my job to curate and style the show by selecting a different plant for each pot to compliment its design and pull the show together as a whole. As you may well know, curating is one of my very favourite things, so I spend a fair amount of time getting the right balance for the show by making sure each pot is placed in just the right spot on the right shelf with the right combination of pots either side of it. It's like a big old jigsaw puzzle. 

It's particularly nice to have the opportunity here to thank all of the designers for being involved.  P L A N T  P O T  has become such a joyous and well anticipated part of LDF and many visitors have been excitedly looking forward to seeing which designers were involved this year and most importantly, what their pots were going to be like. So thank you to all 12 designers who made up this year's collection. Thank you to those of you who visited the show, to those of you who photographed and shared it and to those of you who made Islington Design District the success it has been this year. 

From top left (going left to right, top to bottom), this year's pots are designed by - Laura Slater // Geo-Fleur // Manolya Isik // Origami Est // Tilly Hemmingway // Ruby Taylor // Donna Wilson // Holly Kemp // One Design Space // Kangan Arora // One We Made Earlier // Laura Gee. 

It's been an absolute pleasure to work on this show for 2016. I think it will have to become a SMUG LDF yearly tradition. I wonder what the theme should be next year? Any suggestions?   

#smugplantpot

@lizzieforsmug

Photography by Manolya Isik