I love concrete. I think it’s inbuilt in design geeks to love concrete; something to do with the Barbican and brutalism. But concrete is a lot less brutal than it once was, as this collaboration from Timorous Beasties and Graphic Relief Ltd shows. Launched at Clerkenwell Design Week, it was tucked away in the bowels of the House of Detention, down-lit by spooky spotlights, showing off every detail to fine effect.
Graphic Relief Ltd have taken the Timorous Beasties’ Grand Thistle design, a delicate and detailed wallpaper design that comes in a range of colourways, and even a hand-printed version, and done something quite unexpected – they’ve reproduced it in concrete. All its precise embellishments have been perfectly captured, in a material we largely associate with car parks.
Finding connections between seemingly unrelated things can result in exceptional creativity, and this collaboration is a perfect example of that. Concrete wallpaper; who’d have thought it?
