Clerkenwell Design Week has a way of making the design industry feel like a neighbourhood. For three days every May, the streets fill with architects, makers, and design enthusiasts moving between showrooms, installations, and conversations that tend to spill out well past the official closing time. This year's edition also marked CDW's 15th anniversary, and with it a genuine sense of occasion.
The festival introduced Design Interventions for the first time, a curated series of large-scale, site-specific installations from emerging and established designers, appearing across Clerkenwell's parks, streets, and green spaces. These installations encouraged interaction and prompted conversations about materials and the built environment. Alongside them, the expanded CDW Awards celebrated not just the best new products and innovations, but the disruptors and doers of design.
Hundreds of brands filled the neighbourhood's extraordinary mix of historic venues, from the 900-year-old Church of Design at St Bartholomew the Great to the newly added Haberdashers' Hall. The Swatchbox team was present across the festival this year in ways that felt true to what we do: helping designers navigate, discover, and get closer to the materials that matter.
The CDW Design Guide
Before the festival even opened, the team put together the CDW Design Folio Vol. 1: a curated guide to help designers move through the week, created in partnership with Clerkenwell Design Week and Media10. Suggested journeys organised by product category, featured products, and a bit of fresh inspiration to make the most of every day across the neighbourhood.
It ended up in the hands of visitors right across Clerkenwell. For a team that thinks constantly about how designers discover and engage with materials, being part of how people experienced CDW from the very first morning felt like a natural place to begin.
(Showroom or sponsor registration for priority listing in the CDW 2027 Design Guide is available here.)
Ice Cream, Coffee, and a Few Good Detours
If one installation captured the spirit of CDW 2026, it might have been the Brew House at Brew House Yard, a pavilion Swatchbox was proud to sponsor.
Designed by Studio Egret West and built in collaboration with York Handmade Brick Co. and Simple Works, the structure was made entirely from Brew Bricks: handmade clay bricks incorporating recycled coffee grounds. The idea began as an experiment in the Studio Egret West kitchen, with coffee grounds collected, dried, and worked into traditional clay mixes at the York Handmade Brick factory. The result was a brick containing around 10% less clay, with 500 grams of coffee waste per unit diverted from landfill and returned to the construction cycle.
It sat well within a festival whose sustainability theme ran deeper than surface level. From pavilions grown from London's coffee waste to living installations sprouting chia seeds outside Haberdashers' Hall, CDW 2026 asked serious questions about how design is created and consumed. The Brew House was one of the most talked-about installations of the week and a convincing case for what circular material thinking looks like when it moves from experiment to architecture.
With coffee grounds on the mind, it felt fitting that the Second Life Coffee Cab was just around the corner at St John Square. And for those who collected a ticket at the Sample Gallery, there was ice cream waiting at the Swatchbox x Tarkett cart on Clerkenwell Green.
The CDW Sample Gallery
The Sample Gallery at St James's Church Garden brought together a curated collection of innovative building materials from some of the UK's leading manufacturers.
Naomi Wheeler, a Swatchbox Designer-in-Residence, chose the samples this year. She organised the gallery around three distinct material collections, each one occupying its own table and telling its own story. Rather than grouping materials by colour or category, Naomi built three immersive interior narratives. Each collection was conceived around a central idea and designed to evoke a distinct atmosphere through the interplay of texture, tone, and finish.
The first collection, Neo Deco, is a contemporary take on Art Deco's boldness: jewel tones and high contrast pairings, polished brass and chrome, velvets set against glossy surfaces, marble alongside clean architectural lines. It is both theatrical yet controlled, and eccentric without losing restraint.
Celestial Blue was inspired by the transition from dawn sky to deep space. It layers blues across the full atmospheric spectrum, from soft and airy to infinite midnight-dark. Translucent textures, silver accents, and surfaces that catch light in shifting ways give the palette its sense of movement and calm.
Bronze Prairie started with a conviction that brown is a seriously underrated colour in interiors. The collection draws on vast sunlit grasslands at golden hour, grounding warm camel and saddle tones with burnished bronze highlights. Further inspired by the year of the Fire Horse, it is rooted in landscape and carries a quiet sense of forward momentum.
Putting the three collections together brought some genuine surprises. Naomi found herself increasingly drawn to texture and light reflection over colour, discovering that materials behaved entirely differently depending on what they were placed next to. Some samples, particularly certain brushed metallics and architectural tiles, felt less like surface finishes and more like structural elements. Seeing all three collections laid out across their tables, each one a different kind of material world, was one of the highlights of the week for the team.
Visitors could browse all three collections, discover new brands and finishes, and order samples directly for next-day delivery. All of the samples from Naomi's Clerkenwell curation are still available to order on Swatchbox Pro.
Looking To 2027
Clerkenwell Design Week was a reminder of what this industry looks like when it gathers in one place with genuine curiosity and good questions to answer. For the Swatchbox team, being part of that, across a pavilion built from coffee grounds, serving ice cream from a cart, and a sample gallery in a church garden, was a week well spent. Next year's festival runs from 25 to 27 May 2027. We might see you there!
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Swatchbox is a premier sample fulfillment service for building product manufacturers. With proprietary software designed by insiders of the design community, Swatchbox helps manufacturers improve product sales and brand affinity by delivering material samples to the design community with speed, intelligence, and style. Learn more and join Swatchbox at www.swatchbox.com.
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