Georgia Merritt stages contemporary design show at London antiques dealer
Emerging designer Georgia Merritt has unveiled Refrain, an east London exhibition of sculptural furniture pieces informed by 18th-century architectural mouldings and musical staves.
Refrain is the second solo show for Merritt, who was featured in our London Design Festival Dezeen Dispatch lineup of London's rising stars.
The exhibition brings together five of Merritt's pieces arranged across M Kardana, a 20th-century antiques shop on Hackney Road that was stripped back to form a gallery setting to accommodate the works.
"My pieces can be read as furniture, but equally as sculptures, or propositions for an interior," Merritt told Dezeen. "Showing them at M Kardana, within the context of an antiques dealer, plays on that ambiguity."
The design of each of Merritt's pieces was rooted in the inspiration she finds in the precision of both musical notation and architecture.
Among them is a slim, wall-mounted mirror flanked by a duo of black lacquered doors that open out on full-length piano hinges.
Although made of birchwood, the doors look as if they are solid stone thanks to Merritt's distinctive painting technique, which involves hand-painting timber to create trompe l'œil faux marble furniture.
The designer developed the granular process during a gilding apprenticeship that she completed when struggling to find work as a fine art graduate in 2020.
Also on display is a delicate, hand-formed wire lamp encased in an ellipsoid shade made of silk organza overlaid with gazar.
The lamp and its shade were positioned atop a stainless steel frame fitted with a central, rectilinear tray.
Underscore is a sweeping bench supported by a single leg at one end, and resting against a wall at the other.
The curved seating was carved from smooth sapele wood. Merritt wanted to visually interpret a glissando, the musical term for sliding from one note to the next.
"The bench's profile recalls both Georgian architectural mouldings and the parallel lines of a musical stave," said the designer.
A glass tablet was fitted atop the furniture's single leg, which was selected to echo a magnifying glass or other "apparatus for observation or examination".
Merritt's fourth piece is a low-slung glass table, topped with an elongated canopy made of ivory silk that was clamped to the upper panes of glass with stainless-steel arms.
The final piece in the exhibition is another wall-mounted mirror fastened with piano hinges, but this one is full length and finished entirely in black lacquer.
"When closed, the mirror's doors form a monolithic, modernist silhouette," said Merritt.
Refrain marks the second show that the designer has presented at M Kardana, following her Vague Precision exhibition in 2023.
The designer considered how her practice, which she defines as art as much as design, has developed in recent years.
"I think I'm continually working towards expressing something that I can sense quite clearly but can't necessarily define," she said. "With this exhibition, I feel a little closer to it."
Merritt is interested in making pieces with an "ability to move between different contexts, whether that's a gallery, a domestic interior, or somewhere else".
"I like the idea that their identity might shift slightly depending on where they're placed," she said.
The designer was among the creatives showing in the Max Radford Gallery presentation at London's Collect fair in February.
The photography is by Tazy Jessett Nash.
Refrain is on display at M Kardana, 188A Hackney Road, London E2 7QL, United Kingdom, from 9 to 31 October 2026. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
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