+ THE IDEAL HOME FOR LOCKDOWN LIVING
The Ideal Home for Lockdown Living exhibition and catalogue launch took place at Safehouse 1, Peckham, in September 2025 as part of the London Design Festival and Open House Festival.
The exhibition builds on the Lockdown Space Collection which invited people to post images and films online that shared how they had adapted, re-imagined, transformed and expanded their home environment during lockdown.
The exhibition invited people into the physical space of a house which spatially reframes and re-contextualises the collection to critically reconsider “what is the ideal home in our increasingly unsettled times?” This project was part of an ongoing collaboration with Collectarium from 2020.
For so many at this time everyday domestic space came under intense pressure to simultaneously function as the space for people to work, socialise, exercise, learn, create, entertain, play and escape. The exhibition revealed how people carried out makeshift and ad-hoc interventions to their homes to generate new dynamic, flexible and multi-functional spaces.
The once traditional enclosed spaces of privacy and safety now perform as the office, the gym, the school, the studio, the pub, the club, the campsite, the restaurant, the beach and spaces of the imagination.
Catalogue cards function also as caption cards and were dispersed throughout the house where we exhibited the submissions from the Lockdown Space Collection.
The exhibition design was inspired by the collection itself, and was curated using an ad-hoc approach, adapting and re-using materials found in the space to exhibit the work.
The full set of 108 catalogue cards were on display for viewers to interact with in the workshop room. These prompted conversations with our visitors about memories of Lockdown, offering further insights.
We designed limited edition catalogues to coincide with the 108 submissions. The catalogue includes an essay written by Peter Maloney and a set of catalogue cards that illustrate the text. There are 6 different covers to choose from (available from the Collectarium Website)
SAFE HOUSE PECKHAM: Situated on Copeland Road in Peckham, this was the perfect gallery for our exhibition
PING PONG: The residential site allowed submissions from the collection to become site specific instalations, like this ping pong table
THE LOCKDOWN COLLECTION: We exhibited index cards for all 108 entries to our Lockdown Collection from 2021
ADHOCISM: The installation methods echoed the ad-hoc approaches demonstrated across the collection
CATALOGUE: I wrote an essay which was included in the catalogue, beautifully designed by COLLECTARIUM
