For six days each autumn, Berkeley Square in Mayfair sheds its corporate composure and becomes the epicentre of the collectible design world. PAD London, now in its 26th edition, returns from 13 to 18 October with its signature white tent erected among the mature plane trees and elegant terraces. It remains the UK's premier boutique fair dedicated exclusively to 20th-century and contemporary decorative arts, a place where museum-grade historical pieces sit alongside experimental works fresh from the studio.
Where Craft Meets Sculptural Imagination
This year's edition pulls galleries from across the globe into one intimate space. Gallery FUMI presents the Armadillo Cabinet by Berlin-based duo Lukas Wegwerth and Corinna Dehn, a towering piece layered with fine wooden shingles that take their cues from animal scales. The cabinet is both furniture and sculpture, a functional object that seems to have crawled out of a natural history museum. Nearby, Adrian Sassoon brings Japanese artist Junko Mori's intricate metalwork, including Silver Poetry; Tall Haiku (2025), whose meditative repeated forms feel almost biological in their precision.
The international scope is striking. Beirut-based gallery PIK'D presents ceramic artist Noe Kuremoto's Jomon Series, while Seoul's Gallery LVS and Craft brings Seungjin Yang's Sofa (2026), a piece that takes the most quotidian item of furniture and reconstructs it using elongated resin balloons. It is playful, provocative and unmistakably contemporary, a reminder that PAD has always thrived on the porous boundary between utility and art.
Art That Refuses to Sit Still
One of the most talked-about pieces comes from Samuel Ross, the multidisciplinary designer whose work moves fluidly between architecture, industrial design and fashion. His Amnesia or Platelet Apparition? (2021), presented by New York gallery Friedman Benda, is crafted from marble and powder-coated steel. The piece demands to be read alongside its cryptic title, blurring the line between sculptural object and philosophical provocation. Ross will also feature in The New Black Aesthetic at London's Design Museum in November, cementing his position as one of the most interesting voices working at the intersection of art and design today.
New exhibitors add fresh energy to the fair. Paris-based Initio Arts and Design presents Rebeka Racz's The Watcher Coffee Table, while MAY, the gallery of Maylis and Charles Tassin, brings the CHILL Console, a geometric marvel that confounds the eye. French gallery Theoreme shows Theophile de Bascher's Francas, Centrepiece 7 (2025), continuing the fair's tradition of championing European decorative arts at their most inventive.
Beyond the Tent
PAD's influence spills out of Berkeley Square into the surrounding streets of Mayfair. Brazilian jeweller Silvia Furmanovich has collaborated with British luxury house Asprey on a collection built around exceptional jadeite in rare colours including lavender, white and orange. Meanwhile, Indian designer Vikram Goyal has taken over the top floor of a nearby townhouse to recreate a sumptuous Indian interior, offering visitors a fully immersive experience beyond the fair's walls.
For collectors, designers and anyone interested in where the decorative arts are heading, PAD London remains the most reliable barometer. It is a place to take the temperature of a world that increasingly refuses to distinguish between the beautiful and the functional, the historical and the avant-garde. This year's edition may well be the most enticing yet.
