Installation at London Design Festival - 2025

Introduction

At this year’s London Design Festival 2025, Wernacular presents a unique furniture project first conceived for Baihe Village in Beijing. The work embodies the studio’s ongoing exploration into how design can capture and carry memory, reinterpreting personal and spatial impressions through digital tools and fabrication.

The Concept

Wernacular’s practice is rooted in the intersection of technology, memory, and material culture. By employing digital design and construction methods, the team deconstructs the spatial identity of a specific place—such as a home or village—and reassembles it into the form of furniture.

These pieces are not merely functional objects; they serve as vessels of memory. Each carries the intangible essence of a dwelling, refracted into physical form. When their owners relocate, the furniture travels with them—becoming nomadic, migrating across geographies, yet always retaining a trace of the previous home.

In an age defined by global mobility, Wernacular asks: Can design become a bridge between memory and belonging?

Wernacular seeks to explore:

1. How digital design can translate the uniqueness of a space

2. How furniture can become a continuation of memory and a companion in migration

3. How “dwelling” can retain a sense of personal belonging in today's globally mobile world

A Living Narrative

In October 2024, Wernacular received a commission from a client in Beijing who sought to transform several of his residences in Baihe Village into a multi-building hotel. The design journey began with the gradual transformation of one house, which would serve as the seed for the larger project.

During early conversations, the client emphasized the importance of local identity and asked that the design reflect the relationship between the residences and a nearby temple. This temple, though originally built for worship, had been repurposed as a school during his childhood before falling into disuse. For him, the site preserved vivid memories of his formative years.

Wernacular took this personal history as a starting point, aiming to use digital design and fabrication to capture and preserve these impressions, allowing the architecture—and now the furniture derived from it—to carry forward a fragment of memory that might otherwise be lost.

Fig 1.2 Explore the potential applications of this furniture project within the context of potential projects, where it can be utilized to highlight the local character within the forecourt design.

Digital Design & Making

The process begins with 3D scanning, capturing the subtle geometries and textures of the original environment. These scans serve as a digital archive of memory, which is then reinterpreted through computational design. To bring these digital impressions into material form, Wernacular employs CNC fabrication, allowing precision-making that bridges virtual data and tactile craft. The result is furniture that is both technologically rigorous and emotionally resonant.

“Our goal is to translate the intangible essence of a home into a form that people can live with and carry forward,” says the Wernacular design team. “Furniture becomes a vessel of memory—at once practical and poetic, deeply personal yet universally resonant.”

Coalescence — AA × Alcova, Milan Design Week - 2026

Introduction

Wernacular is honoured that Nomadism Part 2 was selected for Coalescence, an exhibition presented by the Architectural Association and Alcova at Milan Design Week 2026. Carrying the warmth of Eastern mortise-and-tenon craft, the work continues the enquiry begun with Impressions and Nomadism at London Design Festival 2025 — the studio's ongoing exploration of furniture as a vessel of memory.

The Concept

Taking the memory of a specific temple as its prototype, the piece reconstructs traditional mortise-and-tenon (榫卯) joinery through digital fabrication — transforming abstract place-memory into a tactile experience that can be perceived by the body.

As users interact with the furniture, its weight, its texture, and the precise interlocking of its joints naturally evoke the perception of a past ritual space — completing a dialogue across time and place.

Exhibition

Coalescence — presented by the AA and Alcova

20 – 26 April 2026, 11:00 – 19:00 (CEST)

Alcova Milano (Spaces L3), Centro Ospedaliero Militare

7 Via Simone Saint Bon, 20147 Milano

Parametric Dining Table — Commission, November 2025

From Architecture to Furniture

We did not begin by designing a shape — we began by defining use. Dining, working, placing, conversing: behaviours are translated into parameters, which in turn generate the boundary and the patterning of the tabletop.

A Designed Everyday

Every table can be different: dimensions, curvature, and pattern density are recalculated for each space and each user. This is a table generated for a specific person and a specific way of living — not a standard product, but a designed everyday.

Making

The MDF top is CNC-machined so that the parameter-generated toolpaths remain visible on its surface. They are at once pattern and a rehearsal of use — the positions of tableware, the sweep of an arm, the zones where objects are placed again and again.

The legs are cast in concrete, a stable structural core that carries the light top and its complex curves — so that customisation is realised not only in form, but in structure and material.