It’s London Design Week, with the newest and most innovative designs from across the world on show at venues across London, including 100% Design at Olympia and Design Junction at King’s Cross, reinforcing London’s credentials as the design capital of the world.  At Phillip’s, over a century of modern design from Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s chair from the Billiards and Smoking Room at the Argyle Tea Rooms in Glasgow (1898-9) to Jim Partridge and Liz Walmsley’s pair of block seats (2015) is up for auction next week, with guide-prices that reinforce the ongoing interest in modern design from the best designers from Europe, at a period in the late 20th century when materials were manipulated and shaped into new forms which were artistic, beautiful to the eye, and functional, including classics such as Gerrit Thomas Rietveld’s “Red-Blue” armchair which is astonishingly almost 100 years old (1919).

Showing that good design is also an investment, there are lecture theatre chairs designed by Jean Prouve for the Faculte de Lettres at the Universite De Besancon (1952-56) with a guide price of £6,000 to £8,000 for a single chair to £20,000 t0 £30,000 for a pair of doubles, perhaps reinforcing the fact that good design has lasting value, something that today’s “good value” procurement does not necessarily take into account.  It would be a bold and unique university client today who would take the risk of commissioning unique designs like these.