SHOW

Last week we visited the Architect @ Work trade show, which was exhibiting for two days in Olympia, London. The show itself is elegant and well curated, with a beautiful range of interior and architecture products on display. It is a fantastic place to meet like-minded industry professionals, catch up on trends and even buy a book or two at the pop-up RIBA book shop. It also has well-considered opening hours of 13:00 – 20:00…great for busy workers wanting to pop in after a full day in the office. With free drinks and nibbles, as well as free entry if you pre-register, this as a fantastic event not to be missed for architects, designers and specifiers.

TRENDS

2016 FOCUS: WOOD AND ARCHITECTURE

As wood was a focus for the show this year, there was an inspiring collection of ‘wood curiosities’ displayed by SCIN Gallery, Materials Library and Resource. The collection, called ‘Growth Rings’ was

Although we didn’t visit the Paris trade fair Maison & Objet this year, we have been following the event on social media. It’s amazing how you can get a feel for a show without even attending, though it’s never the same as really being there. As we were seeing things published online about the event, I thought it could be interesting to create a quick round-up. The below are what we have seen to be key trends and themes from Maison Object on instagram, twitter and blogs. I have also linked each key trend to one of our own burmatex® design Pinterest boards, for a closer look. 

Wild.

Each year for the show, Maison & Object predict a theme based on consumer habit and predicted trends. This year it was wild and you can see their run down of it here. It’s about letting the wilderness into your working environment, re setting yourself

This autumn, I had the chance to visit the 56th Art Biennale in Venice. As a designer and art lover, this is the type of event that blows my mind and feed my inspiration for developing new ideas for carpets.

Every two years, the Art Biennale shows a big variety of artists and researchers from all around the world. The Venice Biennale is one of the most important contemporary art exhibitions showing, for the first time, works specifically created for the six-months–long event. It gives a global and prospective overview of what artists and creators are working on, in term of concepts, ideas, materials, technologies, colours… Pantone regularly shows some of these art works in their Pantone View colour planner books. As a regular user of these Pantone trend books, we noticed, in the latest one -Winter 2017-18- received last week in our burmatex® offices, some pictures of the gorgeous installation from

Products: origin tanzanite, lateral blue monday, tivoli multiline ibiza blue

In the burmatex® design studio we get a lot of requests for design boards and we try to keep the inspirational imagery that we use on them as fresh, individual and creative as we can. Something that we love to include is photography that we have taken in our own time. Last September I went on a city break to Lisbon and became really obsessed with all of the ceramic tiled buildings and trams. I have used these images on our burmatex design boards as well as inspiration for how to put colours together; from our existing carpet tile collections to new developments we are working on.

Products: tivoli marie galante purple, zip indigo run, academy stamford sapphire

Products: cordiale monaco marina, code  emerald city, tivoli guyana moss

Products: tivoli multiline reunion terracotta, strands ten orange, code sun burst, up tomato, tivoli saona sage, tivoli caicos azure

Products: cordiale costa rican sun, up yellow,  lateral gold quest, tivoli montserrat black, strands ten lime, code blue reef

All images: Authors own or  burmatex®

For 2016, Pantone revealed that there would be two colours of the year – rose quartz and serenity. These are subtle and soft pastel shades, not exactly ideal for flooring! A challenge for us in the design team at burmatex® is to react and adapt to predicted colour trends such as these. We anticipate to see these two colours used in a variety of interior finishes over the coming year and are looking to our ranges to see how they can compliment and work with these. Carpet has to be firstly resilient to traffic and dirt so although we might not have the exact colours in our collections, we can put together schemes and ideas that will look modern and relevant alongside these new colours.

Products: tivoli st martins sand, lateral pewter cloud, tivoli nassau skies, tivoli multiline melanesia grey

Products: balance atomic cotton, balance flint, zip steel cable, surface silver vector

Products: origin pyrite,