Dutch Design Week – What Your Home Will Be Wearing Next

For anyone interested in architecture and interiors the epicentre of edgy design is Eindhoven. Once a year at Dutch Design Week 335,000 visitors and 2,600 professionals gather here to hotly debate (and create) how we’ll think about and move through our environment. Some of the ideas may seem exceptionally unrealistic, but even many of those ultimately end up working their way into our homes. This year’s theme was ‘Stretch’ and many exhibitors did just that by presenting new possibilities for the way we live. We’ve picked up the five hottest trends you can expect to make it home very soon.

From bricks made of plant-based materials to small eco homes that take up little room and even less resource, our future homes will tread lightly on this earth. Building materials made of natural materials mean we’ll be working with nature in the future rather than against it. Bricks, insulation and furniture will be forged with processes that are kinder to the environment and can easily move back into an organic system when a building becomes obsolete. Material Sense Lab, who support businesses and creators in ‘bio-boosting’ design included some staggeringly smart new innovations in their exhibit. These included Xyhlo bio-finish, a natural black ‘paint’ for outside use. A type of fungus called Aureobasidium pullulans where the blacker the treated wood, the healthier the wood will be, allowing it to be re-used safely at the end of its use.

Bio sensors in our clothes and home automation will not only read our mood but reflect or enhance it. From the colour and tone of light to the rhythm and sounds that greet you as you arrive home, the symbiosis of your environment and your senses is the future. Your body temperature rising as you sleep on a sultry summer’s day will prompt your air conditioning system to make the room cooler and more comfortable for optimum rest. Home automation incorporating systems like Powerview will use local time and seasonal information to track the movement of the sun, protecting from excessive thermal gain or holding in the sun’s warmth to keep a home welcoming on a chilly dark evening. Mornings will become less groggy as window coverings softly rotate to allow the daylight to wake you gently rather than the shock of a shrill alarm.

A material, product or structure will no longer have one lifespan – yours or theirs. The future of design will follow a full lifecycle from its first creation to a frequent reinvention, a process known as ‘Cradle to Grave’ (and we’re proud to say Luxaflex achieved this certification for many more of its fabric and mechanism innovations this year). The main square dedicated to design in exhibition venue Klokgebouw was home to the People’s Palace, a structure made of shingles designed to go onto a more permanent home when disassembled; no more gaudy baubles that become obsolete when out of fashion, your home will soon be built to have a long and happy life reincarnating several times over.

Sharp geometry makes way for undulating patterns of rounded edges, the softer shapes bringing home the influence of the natural world, even in high tech fabrics. This trend was everywhere from undulating plates or shimmering decorative waves on organic tableware in irregular forms, to loungers that not only have rounded edges but no symmetry. The repetition of a circle is one of the most pleasing forms on the eye, making even the most sparse of rooms feel sensually welcoming, with strategic design additions like our new Pirouette range in subtle loops of high performance fabrics.

As the most evocative of all the elements on our senses our wellbeing depends on light. Now we expect our design to make more of its qualities from how it’s dispersed to ways we can harness its energy. Daylight or synthetic light used to be the only options but now we demand more than a binary choice. Fabrics at windows are no longer simply about blocking out or allowing in light. There are many variables in between as well as fabrics that can enhance and disperse the qualities of daylight, diffusing and subtly modifying its qualities. At Luxaflex we’ve been studying and innovating with light for nearly 100 years. Our display at DDW with design collective Invertuals illustrates our central pillar of experimentation and high performance. See how with our latest creations Powerview and Pirouette. Beauty that flatters but also challenges.

Love trend news? See our blog for Maison L’Objets 2017 home fashion inside info.