With Limitations apartment reveals unvarnished glimpse into life as a London designer

A lack of money, materials or equipment shaped every object in this mock apartment, which has taken over the basement of London shop Aram as part of an exhibition by guerrilla design collective Design Everything.

With Limitations, which debuted as part of the London Design Festival, takes the form of an imagined designer's apartment to offer a glimpse behind the curtain at how young creatives are managing to survive in one of the world's most expensive cities.

Every piece in the show was made by one of 102 emerging designers and reflects not just the hurdles they faced in the making process but also the weird, wonderful and ingenious ways they've found to overcome them.

"We hope this will enable you to peek behind the veneer of the design industry – the glossy photographs and Instagram reels – to see an honest portrayal of life as an emerging designer today," Design Everything wrote in the exhibition's introductory text.

In total, the exhibition features 130 objects organised into three distinct rooms – a kitchen, living room and bedroom. And although each was born from different constraints, a lack of funds seemed to be at the root of most limitations faced by young designers.

Stuck for time between her two part-time jobs, designer Symran Shah took to knitting during her commutes as a way of rapid prototyping. Once she was happy with the shape, she sand-cast one of her creations to burn away the cotton yarn and leave behind a deceptively soft-looking metal tray for the bedside table.

Faced with skyrocketing material costs, others resorted to creating new objects from off-the-shelf components, scavenged objects and offcuts.

Among them is a bow-shaped light in the kitchen, made by Design Everything co-founder Lewish Duckworth using an old tent pole and a tensioning guy rope. Nearby, another lamp was assembled from found nitrous oxide canisters by Absolute Beginners, a factory in Park Royal that teaches young people how to make everyday products.

"Funnily enough, NOS canisters came up a lot in the open call," Duckworth laughed.

South London designer Felix Fried lent out his own bed, cobbled together using offcuts from a fabrication job, for the sake of the exhibition and is currently sleeping on a mattress on the floor until the show finishes on 10 October.

Unable to access expensive industrial equipment, others turned to creating improvised production lines in their own homes and hacking their existing machinery.

The speckled backsplash in the apartment's kitchen was made by Royal College of Art student Olivia Webb using wilted flowers from local supermarkets and a DIY tile factory she set up in her flatshare.

In the absence of a welding machine, Jake Robertson instead made a floor lamp by cutting and bending an aluminium tube "like peeling a banana", and Sam Braid created his Pylon lights from craft wire and masking tape.

"It's almost like a prototype that is so beautiful in its execution, it becomes the final thing," Duckworth said.

Design Everything has made a splash at LDF in recent years by hosting guerrilla shows that offer young and emerging talent a space to exhibit their work for free.

It's a radical departure from existing participation fee models, where even dedicated emerging designer exhibitions, such as Isola, can allegedly charge around £900 per square metre.

"It's very, very inaccessible," explained Design Everything co-founder Tabatha Pearce Chedier, who is exhibiting a series of lights made from wall mouldings.

"I never thought I could show at LDF at all," she admitted.

Instead of a conventional exhibition, last year's LDF saw Design Everything show 36 chairs by emerging designers from the back of a travelling van. The year before, Duckworth turned the renovation of his friends' record shop into an opportunity to commission work from other young designers he admired.

"The whole point of that show was that you saw the work being used, which became the basis of a lot of what Design Everything is now," he remembered.

"It's about being interactive and playful, about bringing people together, making design feel accessible, and trying to build a community."

This year's show at Aram – a stalwart of the London design scene since 1964 – marks the first time that the collective has gone mainstream.

"They kind of liked our 'punk energy'," Duckworth said.

It's an energy that's very much alive in the Aram show, which doesn't charge a participation fee and encourages visitors to interact with the designs on show instead of placing them on a plinth.

At any given time during the exhibition, Design Everything members, designers and visitors could be found playing with a flat-pack cardboard chess set by Maja Rowecka, perched on sofas made from road signs and bales of cardboard boxes by Charlie Boyden and Max Hayward.

There's also a Jenga set, although this game can't be played since designer Hao Chen has reimagined it as a tiny chest of drawers for holding incense and matchsticks.

In the kitchen, heated conversations about the state of the design industry could be overheard around a dining table assembled from off-the-shelf materials by David Searcy, surrounded by a mishmash of chairs by Jamie Reed, Abby Ghent, Cam Rowley and Gloriana Valverde.

The soundtrack was provided courtesy of a stereo speaker, which designer and DJ David Chen assembled from two £15 IKEA work lamps, 3D-printed adapters and a set of Beyma tweeters.

"I think a lot of us create quite wacky objects," Duckworth said. "And I think being able to engage with them, like actually spend a day with that object, you're like: oh, I actually really like this, and I can see how it would fit within my life."

Throughout the week, the exhibition also hosted live making sessions with some of the designers.

Oliver Linnell assembled a candelabra of nuts and bolts from B&Q's pick-and-mix section, Polly Jennings showed how she slip-casts cups using DIY cardboard moulds, and Anna McAllister used a vegetable steamer and an electric hob to mould balsa wood into a minimalist wall clock, using a process she developed in her own kitchen.

In total, the exhibition features 130 objects by 102 designers, which might sound like a lot but is only a fraction of the 520 submissions that Design Everything received to its open call – more than three times as many as last year.

"I hope it's because we feel accessible that people apply with stuff that they've made and feel like there's an opportunity there instead of being intimidated and put off," Duckworth said.

The Design Everything team – Jacob Marks, Eleanor Murphy, Sammi Cherryman, Izi Thexton, Duckworth and Pearce Chedier – went through each project and developed a points system to rank them based on how well they fit the theme and what was needed for the apartment.

Duckworth also interviewed each of the 102 participants about the limitations they face and photographed their workshops, with the results collated in the final part of the exhibition.

In total, the process of organising the exhibition took around six months, during which the members also created their own contributions to the show and held down their day jobs.

"Everyone's kind of got their bread and butter," Duckworth explained. "It's a bit of a passion project for now. But we're hoping that we can get some funding soon."

The photography is by Kane Hulse.

With Limitations is on show from 11 September to 10 October 2026 as part of London Design Festival. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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