Design that breaks all the rules: discover the up-and-coming creatives stirring things up at Decorex London 2019

Decorex, now in its 42nd year, is the daddy of design shows. Opening on Sunday, it targets interior decorators at the top end of the market, but now it’s getting trendy with rule-breaking newbies.

It has a new venue in Olympia, an adventurous installation powered by “augmented reality” and super-cool, fresh creatives who have been trading for less than 10 years. They are livening up the more familiar outfits that push lacquered furniture, damasks, plush carpets and traditional lighting.

Charlotte Raffo founded The Monkey Puzzle Tree two years ago, to bring independent artists and designers into the world of wallcoverings.

Her latest coup collaborates with Drew Millward, a “real northern institution” who does artwork for rock bands. His imagined cityscape is now a punchy line drawing printed on to warm and friendly cork.

Another recent start-up is Melinda Marquardt of The Vale London. She’s adding a lovely “Timeless” linen in olive, sage and silver to her surreal toile of lions’ heads.

Award-winning Laurent Peacock was an industrial designer before retraining to make furniture in 2016/17. He’s set peppercorns into resin for an appealing, tactile finish.

Maxine Hall and Paula Moss set up Derbyshire design studio Blackpop in 2013. Their slightly subversive take on pattern making has bagged prestigious clients such as the National Gallery and Sir John Soane’s Museum.

The same year, Lee Thornley founded Bert & May to market “pigments, materials and fine craftsmanship” in his trademark artisan tiles, paints, solid brass taps and concrete basins.

Also in 2013, designer Robbie Llewellyn and factory owner Adam Yeats began using skilled Birmingham metalworkers for their lighting label Bert Frank.

“We make everything in the UK, whether traditionally turned or laser cut,” they say.

Architect Richy Almond and his brother Paul, trading since 2014, are “obsessed with metal”, handcrafting sleek contemporary furniture in the North-East.

Also in 2014 came Londoners Caroline Lindsell and Dylan O’Shea with A Rum Fellow. They uncover skills of foreign artisans, notably Mayan weavers, for modern textiles.

A year later Charlotte Jade was turning her love of nature into botanical and animal patterns for fabrics and papers. She’s now working on designs with London Zoo.

In 2016 came Royal College of Art graduate Beatrice Larkin. “I do drawings by hand,” she says, “then my Jacquard loom blurs the edges.”

Markedly modernist, her influences include grids and graphs, West African textiles, the Bauhaus and brutalist architecture.

Kit Miles, also from the RCA, set up shop in 2013.

His distinctive drawing is divinely detailed with surreal flourishes and he’s added huge geometrics to his autumn wallpaper and fabrics portfolio.

In 2011, Londoner Kirath Ghundoo first captivated customers with her cheeky mismatched patterns for wacky walls. Now she’s offering a fabulously dense gold base paper for her prints.

Also look out at Decorex for the many more established brands distinguished by design.

They include Tom Faulkner (strikingly geometric metal furniture); Mini Moderns (quirky pictorial papers); Julian Chichester (finely crafted bespoke furniture), Crucial Trading (floor coverings), Pinch (elegant sofas and cabinets), Curiousa & Curiousa (lustrous blown glass lighting), Dominic Schuster (antiqued mirror finishes), and Amsterdam-based Barn in the City.

Fung & Bedford will bring their sculptural paper screens billed as “architectural origami”. Designer-maker Kevin Stamper’s cabinets are often “pixellated” with meticulously cut and dyed veneers applied in his Wimbledon workshop.

Anthony Critchlow will bring sculptural metalwork, and Design-Nation will host a group of their designer maker members.