Design Porn: Mini Moderns Margate

While my love of design is usually kept strictly in the Victorian to Art Deco eras (COLOURS! Glass! Colours AND GLASS! And dark, dark wood.) I have a massive soft spot for Mini Moderns, not least because the Moderns, Mark and Keith, live in my neck of the woods in Camberwell - remember those brilliant mugs? I think there's one set left if you ask them nicely - and because they make beautiful things that are filled with inspiration and fun.

At the weekend, I popped along to their Open Studios at the Camberwell Arts Festival,  and came across Margate. Ah, lovely Margate...is something probably only Tracey Emin said up until recently, but when the Turner Contemporary Gallery opened in 2011, things smartened up a bit. (Apologies in advance to any incensed lovers of Margate).

The gallery commissioned a series of pieces for their shop: aprons, oven gloves, and tea towels. It's all just been released on the Mini Moderns site too as part of the Hinterland collection. That whole collection is beautiful: the other place named heavily is Dungenesse, an area they love anyway, having just renovated a Victorian (YAY!) railway carriage. It is ridiculously sexual. Regardez les pictures.

This tea towel is available in indigo (top) and lido - the rope spelling out the name is brilliant. It's £8.

The oven gloves are £20,  and the aprons - Margate anchors  and Margate gulls - are also £20.

If you're heading to the Design Festival later this summer, Mini Moderns are taking over the Southbank Centre Festival Terrace shop (home to a rather embarrassing number of Sluttery "Oh...my wallet just...fell open. Yes, twice, alright stop interrogating me" incidents) for the whole of September to revisit their REMIX project. 

That was where the Moderns chaps gave their take on classic Southbank Centre patterns, and showed up some quite beautiful stuff, so it's really exciting to be doing it again with new colourways and new product lines - and new patterns. And basically things that I can look at and go "Yes please" like the C-60 wallpaper.