By Darren Southgate

What a day yesterday, well worth the visit to Olympia, taking our staff out for the day. London is such a dynamic place, a much over-used phrase, but undoubtedly so. If you haven’t been to 100%design it’s a festival of design focusing on interiors and products.

Fascinating talks about sustainable materials, for example, using waste coffee to make household products, waste meat used to make bathroom products, mostly using organic resins and these by-products as fillers or aggregates. There were some strange statistics being bandied about which didn’t resonant with me, but reduce, reuse, reinvent are all positive things in my book.

The talk about ‘be a peacock not a pigeon’ was uplifting and reassuring for us in that we’re masters of our own destiny and doing all the right things for our brand. There was certainly a perception from our team that London is special and a microcosm, but that’s not a bad thing because you can join in! We all loved Kirkby Design’s Tube Train showcasing ‘Underground Vol.II’ outside Olympia with retrospective TFL fabrics and colour ways on show.

After four hours of looking at design trends, products and styling we took ourselves off around London to enjoy the growing city and admire our kind of architecture. You can tell we are architects, walking around with our noses in the air, checking out the skyline and walking into bins and other street furniture. These days are such good experiences for intellectual discovery and resetting ones cerebral processor!

Our evening meal at Vinoteca, Kings Cross was fabulous, steak and wine, beautifully cooked. It’s still hard to believe this whole area was an industrial wasteland not so long ago, I’ve had the good fortune to see this area transform.

Perfect timing all day with team SASA, home by Midnight!