By FCI London | Trade Insights | June 2026
Every year, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour becomes the most important building in the city, particularly when it comes to London interiors. And this is not usually a loud announcement but design enthusiasts know that they need to be here for a room by room analysis of what great design looks like when there are no compromises and no cutting corners.
This year, WOW!house 2026 started on the 2nd June and it will continue till 2nd July at its favourite destination - Design Centre Chelsea Harbour and if you have never been before, we can not recommend it enough because this year genuinely felt like a turning point. Twenty one rooms, twenty one world-class designers and perhaps hundreds of suppliers - each of them were given a full scale space and complete creative freedom to fill it with everything that they love. The result, as you might have heard from anyone who visited, was simply extraordinary.
Our interior designer and architect, Andrei Lee spent a full day there this week, walking through every room with the attention of someone who professionally and personally has a deep love for design. He came back impressed with a very full camera roll, lots of thoughts and a very clear picture of where the future of design is heading. So here is Andrei’s review of the event.
Before we focus on individual rooms, it’s important to step back and have a feel for what connected all the rooms together as there was definitely a common thread that worked across all rooms.
"We've really moved away from minimalism," Andrei says. "Not quite into full maximalism, but almost. It was just really intricate design. Beautiful textures everywhere. Velvet in terms of fabrics. Very colourful stuff - plums, burgundies, deep colours. Really lovely to see."
This feedback is quite in sync with the broader design that the world has been signalling for some time. Even at Salone del Mobile earlier this year, we saw the shift towards brighter colours, layered interiors and more human. WOW!house just confirmed this shift because the rooms that drew the largest crowds were the ones with personality and what would feel like the opposite of minimalism.
"Everything was so different," Andrei adds. "Every single room was a different designer, which is really cool to see. But the common thread was this move toward richness. Textures, materials, depth. It was really really beautiful."
One of the rooms at WOW!house 2026 that combined the best directional impulses into a single, coherent space was the library by Róisín Lafferty, created in collaboration with Shepel'.
The Irish designer described these libraries as "places of introspection, imagination and cultural memory" and the room delivered exactly that.
For Andrei, this was one of the highlights and the lighting in particular, just stopped him in his tracks. "The sculptural lighting in that room was incredible," he says. "They were using panelling there in a really cool way."
There was so much to love in this space, the sweeping curves of bespoke joinery, intricate marquetry and high gloss finishes - all brought together in a dark but moody palette that was perfectly accentuated by designer lighting. The ambiance allowed the room to reveal itself in a slow, pleasurable manner which talks heaps about the talents of this designer.
Martin Kemp Design went with Grace Jones as their muse - and this is enough to tell most designers about the room's ambitions and execution.
Organic and circular in plan, this parlour was the perfect design for conversations and intrigue. The drapery was styled in a way that it moved and pooled and yet the main event was something you would least expect - the ceiling. This room really rewarded every visitor who looked upwards as much as one who looked around.
"That ceiling - I am in love with it," Andrei says, with the kind of directness that signals genuine feeling rather than professional observation. "I have honestly never seen anything like it before. The panelling in the ceiling with the fabric hanging off it. Incredible. That was a real highlight for me."
"I think I saw a lot of ceiling design this year that was really cool," he adds. "It is something you would probably use more in commercial design than residential, but honestly it was really, really inspiring to see. The attention to detail was extraordinary."
The Misia bedroom was, in Andrei's words, simply a room that he loved.
Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay, a former fashion stylist, created this space which channeled the optimism and the glamour of Art Deco without being too direct about it. Casamance fabrics - rich, considered, entirely themselves - met geometric plasterwork, carved wood, verdigris detailing and wall-to-wall carpet.
Being in the room simply felt like an out of the world or perhaps outside of time experience. You would feel like you could be at any point of time in the last hundred years.
"Misia Paris - they are a collaborator from Casamance, which is a textile brand," Andrei explains. "And I loved that room. Mainly because the fabrics in that room were just wonderful."
It is worth mentioning that Casamance is a brand that designers know well and respect enormously. Seeing their textiles given a room of this ambition and executed at this level was, as Andrei puts it, really lovely to see.
"The sculptural lighting was, for me, a real highlight," Andrei says. "Everything was really thought out. We are not going to see it as much in residential, of course - but I think it will eventually get there. We are already seeing more and more of it.The way the lighting was done all over was really, really cool. Really smart solutions. Accent lighting on bookshelves. Stuff on the floor just to highlight walls. Some stuff more decorative, some more about layering. Very different, very creative ways of doing it.."
"Some of the use of metals and the organic pieces - the Porta Romana stuff was really stunning in there," he adds. "And the attention to detail on the marble edging. The double bull noses. That sort of detail. It was just really considered."
"It was just really nice to be in a space where we had moved away a bit from minimalism," Andrei says. "All these textures, all these beautiful materials together. Everything was so different. It was genuinely inspiring."
WOW!house is not, of course, a showroom. The rooms exist for a month, then disappear. They are built with the intention to inspire, not to be replicated directly. But the directions they set - the materials they champion, the details they celebrate, the moods they create - those are entirely transferable.
What Andrei brought back from WOW!house 2026 was a set of clear signals. Richness over restraint. Texture over smoothness. Lighting as architecture. Ceilings given the same consideration as walls or flooring. Marble edging specified with the same care as the marble itself. Fabrics chosen not for what they look like in photographs but for what they feel like in a room.
So trends would not really be the right word for them - we would prefer to call them directions and they are the ones that FCI London has also been moving towards, for quite some time now. If you are in the middle of a project or beginning a new one and want to understand what such considered design would look like, the conversation starts at our showroom.
FCI London is one of the UK's leading luxury furniture and interiors destinations, representing hundreds of premium European brands across furniture, lighting, kitchens, wardrobes, rugs and bespoke interiors. Our North London showroom is open seven days a week.
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