Words nova

London Design Festival closed this weekend, and the most quietly radical room in the city wasn’t in a museum — it was inside a rug studio on Calvin Street. For Progressive Permanence, gallerist Max Radford invited his roster of emerging furniture designers into the Shoreditch studio of Christopher Farr, the rug producer founded in 1988, and paired their work with archival textiles by bona fide 20th-century giants. The result: a Louise Bourgeois text-rug hanging behind an orange polyurethane-mesh chair, Bauhaus weaving behind brutalist stone, and the strongest possible argument that today’s craft-led designers belong in the same conversation as the masters.