In London, artisans are keeping hands-on heritage alive – meet the makers championing the craft revival

When London Craft Week, an annual celebration of the handmade, unfurled across the center of the city this past May, the work of a thousand or so makers bloomed out of every corner. Glassblowers opened up their Deptford workshops. Batik textiles filled the walls of St. James’s galleries. Ancient ceramics populated storied auction houses. What’s more, long lines amassed to see the works, an undeniable testament to the growing interest in traditional crafts movements and the makers behind them.

Case in point: When London Craft Week was launched by founder Guy Salter in 2015, it recorded around 20,000 visitors; this year approximately 250,000 came. But London has always been a makers’ town. The city’s tailors and textile artists have shaped global fashion, and its craft heritage has deep roots stretching back to the 12th century, when artisans and merchants founded guilds to protect their skills and commercial interests.

Over the centuries that followed, groups of tailors, pewterers, furniture makers, and dyers formed and, after growing in power and influence, built livery halls—grand, palatial spaces layered in history. In 2026, 114 of these legacy collectives still remain, supporting a new generation of makers working to meet the moment. In the face of an increasingly automated, AI-generated world, more of us are seeking objects and experiences that are human, with provenance and a sense of place.

This hunger for the handmade is being met

This hunger for the handmade is being met well beyond Craft Week. Since the fair began 11 years ago, others have launched: Collect gathers 300 artists and makers at neoclassical Somerset House each February; basketry, which is enjoying a widespread revival, has its own annual summer festival, Tear Up. Meanwhile, The Great Pottery Throw Down, a reality show in which amateur ceramists are pitted against one another in hands-on challenges, has a prime-time spot on British television, and many makers are now offering bookable workshops to create greater access to London’s creative pulse.

In perhaps no other city can you visit a royal-family-approved Savile Row tailors, a seamster for Europe’s biggest Carnival, and Britain’s oldest embroidery house all in one day. None of this, of course, would exist without the centuries of craft heritage that transformed London into a global design influence and that lingers with whatever purchase you may bring home from the city’s workshops and ateliers.

At Lock & Co. Hatters, a 350-year-old hat shop in St. James’s, “you’re buying into a little piece of history,” says milliner Awon Golding. “And that’s so much more special.” —Clare Coulson
Allyson Williams, lead seamster
Deep in West London’s Yaa Centre—a buzzing arts hub that nurtures the creativity behind the Notting Hill Carnival, West London’s annual celebration of Caribbean culture—is the headquarters of Carnival matriarch Allyson Williams.

Williams is lead seamster at Genesis, one

Williams is lead seamster at Genesis, one of the UK’s longest-running masquerade bands, the collectives whose handcrafted costumes bring the traditions and stories of Afro-Caribbean ancestry—plus a contagious joy—to the neighborhood’s streets in August, drawing millions of attendees each year. Soundtracked by the lush, syncopated rhythms of calypso music, the space contains atelier-style cutting tables that bestride deep plastic containers scarcely repressing explosions of sequins, velvet, silk, brocades, and Lycra (“I’ve used every material known to man,” says Williams).

Shelves host fragments of outrageously bejeweled body sculptures. Williams creates samples referencing a chosen theme each year for revelers to order from; garments are then tailored to their specifications. Some involve wild proportions—one client masquerades as a Moko Jumbie (stilt-walking dancer). She established Genesis in 1980 with her late husband and Carnival cofounder, Vernon Williams, and what began as costumes serving as faithful re-creations of historical events and civilizations were superseded in the late 2000s by fantastical themes dominated by meticulously decorated bodysuits and bikinis: “Learning those techniques was incredibly uplifting and exacting; there’s nowhere to hide,” she says.

“I’d like to be remembered as the person who brought amazing designs to life—and made a mean bikini.” —Katie Baron
Blenheim Forge, knife makers
“We somehow forged a knife in conditions where it shouldn’t have succeeded, then spent years obsessively trying to replicate it,” says Blenheim Forge cofounder Jon Warshawsky. It’s an apt origin story for a brand birthed as a DIY endeavor in a South London backyard that now operates out of a railway arch.

Entering the Peckham home of the small-batch knife

Entering the Peckham home of the small-batch knife makers is like slipping into a steam-punk dreamscape. Iron gates wrought into patterns open into a small courtyard filled with metal ephemera, which leads to a door camouflaged by a mural of a bull and a jester. Warshawsky and his cofounders, James Ross-Harris and Richard Warner, may be self-taught, but the workshop’s location has a long legacy of metalwork, having been the site of two bronze foundries during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Inside, the aroma of maple wood erupts as a knife’s handle is put through its band saw paces. Bars of steel are fused together like a sandwich, heat-treated and tempered for durability and sharpness, and then ground down, polished, etched, and honed. The workshop isn’t just an opportunity to witness these makers at work, though: Along with a tour, knife-sharpening classes using Japanese whetstones are offered to help customers keep these high-performance knives—designed with chefs and home cooks in mind and inspired heavily by Japanese craftsmanship—razor-sharp in their kitchens.

Warshawsky, Ross-Harris, and Warner also like to flex their creative muscles with a bimonthly “special” using new techniques. Stop by and you might come across a new oyster shucker design or a BBQ knife. Plus, they’ve started using their own, specially commissioned smelted steel that will, says Warshawsky, “level up everything we make.” —K.B. Bellerby & Co., globe makers
The cavernous corrugated-roofed studio of Bellerby & Co.

Globemakers in bohemian Stoke Newington feels more like

Globemakers in bohemian Stoke Newington feels more like a film set than a 21st-century northeast London atelier. It’s a vivid tableau of the meticulous process behind each bespoke globe: Sets of cartographer’s gores hang from pegs and string across windows (each globe has 12 or 24 of these panels that will be dampened and then precisely applied to the surface of the sphere), and tables are topped with globes in all sizes awaiting the meticulous hand-painting and illustration that is applied by a team of watercolor artists.

When founder Peter Bellerby was searching for a globe for his father almost two decades ago, he couldn’t find anything right. So he went on a two-year odyssey to create one himself and launched his namesake firm along the way. “Globes are a wonderful convergence of the arts and the sciences,” he says of the skill in engineering, geography, and artistry required. Most globes take between a few weeks and a few months to make, and each is a work of art, customized for clients with family histories, past travels, migration routes, and personalized themes.

Apprentices here train for at least one year before producing the smallest, an 8.5-inch desk globe. The showstopping 50-inch diameter Churchill, meanwhile, is one of the largest hand-painted globes in the world and can be witnessed firsthand by appointment only—or during one of the studio’s rare (and usually booked-up) open houses. —C.C. Hand & Lock, embroiderers
The Fitzrovia HQ of royal-warranted Hand & Lock, Britain’s oldest and most revered embroidery house, is a treasure trove of decorative artistry inconspicuously set behind glazed double doors.

Each floor of the four-story building possesses

Each floor of the four-story building possesses a palpable air of mystique thanks to a list of confidential projects with its long-standing royal, military, fashion, and pop culture clientele. Highlights include a jewel box of a shop lined with wood drawers of glittering gemlike brooches, insignia, cords, and colored fringes; an embroidery and monogramming school; and a bead room for commissioning consultations.

Work they can divulge: items for King Charles III’s coronation, including ceremonial and regimental garments; former politician Penny Mordaunt’s cape dress and headband; the winged jacket for Elton John’s Who Believes in Angels? album cover; and cinematic projects for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. The house also embroidered a luxury train carriage’s interior and cushions for the 2026 Brit Awards.

Visitors to the headquarters will find items featuring intricate goldwork; the flawlessly uniform fluidity of couture-associated tambour beading; and “silk shading,” wherein silk threads coalesce into a painterly breed of realism often used to depict flowers or animals. Transcending traditional atelier models, Hand & Lock also creates two main collections (as well as capsule collections) annually, sells YouTube-tutorial-accompanied taster kits, and hosts courses with The National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Kew Gardens, inspired by those institutions’ archives.

Why the booming popularity

Why the booming popularity? A growing desire for modern heirlooms—and exquisite attention to detail. —K.B. Maya Njie, perfumer
A second-floor hideaway rumbling with the beat of London’s tube line, the Shoreditch studio of Maya Njie is an intimate reflection of the independent perfumer’s home and Swedish Gambian heritage. More vintage boutique than clinician’s lab, it’s here that she develops her genderless and vegan scents (autobiographical fragrances that encapsulate people and places) and runs private workshops.

A mood-board-esque wall of thank-you cards, exhibition fliers, and her own photos dominate the entry. Having studied surface design at London’s University of the Arts, she’s still a prolific image maker: Each scent comes with an evocative postcard-size visual. Paintings are propped against walls and surrounded by a period-eclectic mix of furniture “mostly sourced from eBay,” says Njie, including a German medicine cabinet of precious olfactory accoutrements like resins, essential oils, aroma compounds, cruelty-free musk, and molecules—the components with which she creates her unique blends.

The finessed formulas are left to mature then filtered into small batches. Ten years after she launched her business online, she now has eight core scents: a personal cultural archive in olfactory form. “There’s an importance in diverse cultural stories being told [ before France was the epicenter of fragrance,” she says

Everyone can take inspiration from a place,

“Everyone can take inspiration from a place, but it’s vital to have perfumers telling stories deeply authentic to who they are.” —K.B. Anderson & Sheppard, tailors
Stepping into the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled bespoke tailoring house of Anderson & Sheppard, established on Savile Row in 1906, is like entering a living slice of quintessential British heritage. An old-school gentleman’s club in style, it contains a leather sofa, a fireplace, and a crystal decanter with tumblers laid out.

Tantamount to classified documents, biblically weathered order/measurements books, where every client’s details are still logged by hand, line the shelves. “We’re sticklers for tradition,” says front-of-house custodian Martin Crawford. “People like to come in and see their grandfather’s handwriting.” A corridor provides glimpses of the cutters at work, in full suiting, and paper patterns—anatomical blueprints—hanging from metal hooks.

The cutters, of whom A&S has both trouser and coat specialists, are the architects of each design, measuring, drafting, and hand-cutting garments ready for tailor-made construction. Here suit making is both an art form and a vocation, and the experience of buying one is positively theatrical. Subtle staging matters: A&S developed the “English drape” in the late 1920s, a softer, demilitarized, more glamorous tailoring language (a.k.a.

The great softening) made to incorporate a sense

“the great softening”) made to incorporate a sense of movement in the designs. Popularized by King Edward VIII, it has drawn numerous fans in the century since, including Fred Astaire and Brad Pitt, and while men remain its mainstay (“Other houses are far better at suiting the female form,” says Crawford), its tailors also crafted Marlene Dietrich’s famous black tux. Fluidity rules in this perfectionist’s paradise: “The job necessitates being very self-critical,” says senior cutter Leon Powell of the process.

“But our work is rooted in feeling, or the ‘rock of eye’ [a tailor’s intuition].” —K.B. Ella Merriman, rush basketry artist
Amid the silk-dyeing and ceramics studios of the labyrinthine Cockpit Arts building in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Museum, works Ella Merriman, an artist and designer whose experimental twists on traditional basketry have propelled her to the forefront of the conceptual handicraft movement.

The industrial space is chock-full of eight-foot bolts of rushes (the flexible lengths of plants woven into baskets), harvested just once annually in Somerset, and garlands using offcuts of the material lining the windows. Prototypes on display range from woven vessels to vast circular lighting fixtures. Her métier often involves teasing rush into unfathomably shaped objects using, in her words, “weird molds” as diverse as traffic cones and thrifted vases.

Taking the harvested stems, dried slowly to retain

Taking the harvested stems, dried slowly to retain their flexible nature (thick stems serve as uprights, narrower stalks the weft “threads”), she works around these structural bases, weaving intuitively by hand. Current projects (right now a brightly colored chair and footstool) rest patiently on dust-sheeted tables. Delightfully disheveled, her space echoes the poetic idiosyncrasies of nature central to her work: “Slight wonkiness is so beautifully human,” says Merriman, who fell into her practice accidentally via a short course after studying furniture and product design and now offers introductory workshops on the endangered craft.

“Working with a material like this is a relationship,” she says. “I like that nothing is uniform. In design you’re trained to find repeatable functions, but here every stem is different and must be respected.” —K.B. Michael Ruh, glassblower
In the southeast London studio of Michael Ruh, the blazing furnace pushes the temperatures up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit in summer, and the air is scented with the distinctive perfume of woodsmoke and molten beeswax, used to lubricate the glassblower’s tools.

The process, which recycles optical glass waste product, is a visceral and sensory practice, and speed and movement are key—malleable molten glass waits for no one. Born in Minnesota, Ruh studied fine art before he began working with glass in Belgium. He launched his namesake studio with partner Natascha Wahl (at right in photo) in 2004 and moved to his current mews site in leafy Dulwich in 2013.

Alongside producing glassware and private commissions, the studio

Alongside producing glassware and private commissions, the studio hosts occasional workshops in glass engraving and open houses. It’s the constant motion and the possibilities of this challenging material that first captured the imagination of the maker, whose recycled glassware, lighting, and tableware is highly sought-after. Sculptural pieces are blown and shaped using innovative molds made out of paper or wood; organic curves or impressions are added in the soft glass.

His beautiful, functional objects are distinctive for their subtle markings, created with self-made tools: Tumblers are circled with fine lines, often inspired by the light, landscapes, or bracing icy winters of his childhood back in the Midwest—memories that are frozen in time as the glass rapidly cools. —C.C. Lock & Co. Hatters, milliners
Hatmaker Awon Golding stands in the tiny attic workroom on the top floor of Lock & Co.’s storied hat shop in central St.

James’s, where the rafters are filled with fedoras and boaters, and her team stitches, sculpts, and trims summer’s most extravagant headwear. Celebrating its 350th anniversary this year, Lock & Co. is the oldest shop in London—and the oldest hat shop in the world—yet very little about the craft has changed in that time. Hats are still made on wooden blocks (carved by Boon and Lane in Luton, just outside the city), and boaters are made with strip straw (a continuous length of woven straw handsewn in a spiral).

Both are critically endangered crafts, being kept alive

Both are critically endangered crafts, being kept alive by the work of Lock & Co.’s fastidious milliners. In tiny, hushed workrooms each stage of the hat is overseen by an all-women team: hand-dyeing, steaming, and finishing with the finest ribbons, feathers, and flowers that cover every surface. A stone’s throw from the historic St. James’s Palace, the shop has served countless royals (it currently holds a royal warrant from the king), along with politicians (Winston Churchill’s order ledger sits in the ground floor “heritage room”), authors, actors, and icons including Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana.

The bowler hat was invented here (it was originally commissioned for the gamekeepers of the Holkham estate in Norfolk), and top hats are among the many custom orders fulfilled by specialist hatters on the ground floor, where bestsellers include felt fedoras, trilbies, and panamas, which are stored in the brand’s much-coveted round boxes—necessary protection given that many pieces use vintage materials that aren’t readily available in much of the world.

“We say that we make heirlooms,” says Golding. —C.C. Kaori Tatebayashi, ceramist
Kaori Tatebayashi’s airy Deptford studio in southeast London is filled with ceramic flowers. There are towering foxgloves suspended along the walls; primroses, miniature irises, and hyacinths arranged in a tableau on the floor; and tables topped with full-blown tulips as well as an unfurling magnolia flower held on a branch.

Hand-modeling, she captures a fleeting moment

Hand-modeling, she captures a fleeting moment of the plant’s life and works directly on her kiln shelf to create warm white stoneware. “Once I start, I don’t stop—I have to be so quick,” she says of the time constraints of working with clay. Each piece is fired and then left unglazed and undecorated so that the focus is on the flower’s form. “When the color is removed, you see plants with a fresh eye.” Born in Arita, home of Imari porcelain, Tatebayashi studied ceramics at Kyoto City University of Arts before moving to London to study at the Royal College of Art.

Alongside solo exhibitions at Tristan Hoare Gallery in Bloomsbury, she takes on private commissions and site-specific installations. Decorated with antique furniture, cabinets filled with curiosities, and books of botanical drawings, her studio, hidden at the back of a modern building on the banks of the Thames (at high tide the water laps just feet from her door), is one of many artist spaces populating the neighborhood that welcome visitors by appointment.

A table displays plants spring, when her favorite bulbs begin to emerge, personal life is put on hold. “When they start flowering, I drop everything.” —C.C. Mary Wing To, whip and harness maker
The smolderingly musky scent of leather is absorbed instantly on a visit to Mary Wing To’s garden workshop in suburban south London

The material is the cornerstone of a luxurious

The material is the cornerstone of a luxurious artisanal practice straddling the rare craft of traditional whip and harness making (she was protégé to the Queen’s master saddler), fashion design, and sculpture. Blankets of it sit atop a sumptuous marble cutting slab, and her studio is filled with Tohiti canes for whip shafts, her favorite awls for piercing, scoring and dyeing, mood boards marrying editorials, equestrianism, and erotica, and mannequin heads, both equine and human.

Wing To discovered leather craft during her fashion design and technology MA at London College of Fashion, when she undertook a saddlery course at Capel Manor College as its first-ever fashion student, upskilling to produce her equestrian-inspired final collection. That parlayed into an apprenticeship at the Royal Mews, the working stable that oversees royal ceremonial transportation—she was on duty for the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales—and proximity to “leather craft at its highest level”.

Whip making camecipline—both in the process and finished pieces—has driven her to deliver numerous competition wins for saddlery and wearable arts, and exhibition honors at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. “For me, it’s always been about consistency, discipline, and passing on these skills [and] incredible legacies.”

Rian Kanduth, gilder Rian Kanduth normally works upside

Rian Kanduth, gilder
Rian Kanduth normally works “upside down and really high up” across private homes, artists’ studios, museums, and UNESCO heritage sites. Like paramedics for at-risk art, she and her team sometimes undertake emergency conservation, from dealing with damaged carvings to time-pressured archaeological digs. Her diminutive studio in the City & Guilds of London Art School is like an alchemist’s chamber meets forensic laboratory.

Her projects often demand exacting historical knowledge and a scientifically granular handle on environmental factors including heat, light, and humidity, and every inch of the space is surrendered to experimentation: cabinets and refrigerators hold pigments and abrasives including rabbit-skin glue, dragon’s blood (a crimson tree resin for vibrant glazes) and dead bugs’ graveyard (cochineal dye), and test tubes of gold leaf bling are tacked to the wall for eye-level inspection.

Sensorial instincts are vital because water gilding—the application of a micro-thin layer of metal or other ornamental substrate to a surface—is an art form of more than 18 steps, some featuring processes going back 5,000 years. Other techniques include pastiglia (intricate paste work patterns), verre églomisé (reverse glass gilding, creating a shimmering effect), sgraffito (scratching a surface layer to reveal a contrasting underlay), gesso, and punchwork (stamping patterns into a gilded surface).

It’s a constant analytical process where we’re perfecting

“It’s a constant analytical process where we’re perfecting the recipe, says Kanduth.” One that “requires us to use all our senses, including smell, to do the right thing.” —K.B. Darren Appiagyei, wood sculptor
Anchored in the stoic energy of heavy-duty machinery, the workshop of award-winning wood artist Darren Appiagyei in Deptford’s Cockpit Arts studios is a dusty, spit-and-sawdust hub suited to the slow satisfaction of iterative hands-on experimentation.

The room he affectionately calls “the shed” is dominated by a hulking lathe, simple workbench and chrome shelving unit brandishing an array of logs. It’s here that self-taught Appiagyei transforms the raw shafts of felled trees—relishing their grains, knots, and imperfections—into receptacles at equal turns robust and exquisitely fragile-looking. They’re so finely honed, often featuring wafer-thin walls, that they sometimes resemble ceramics.

During a practice he describes as “very meditative, even therapeutic,” he carves into the trunks (all commandeered within a five-mile radius, aligned with his reverence for nature and focus on sustainability), finessing parts of the exterior and leaving others raw to expose the timber’s unique organic patina. Sometimes he uses a pyrography device to scorch tiny dots onto the surface like a 3D pointillist, rendering them “stylistically primitivist but also very refined.” A decade since he graduated in 3D design from Camberwell College of Arts, where he first learned wood turning, his obsession with the material remains undimmed “because it has a life of its own,” he says.

It’s wholly its own organism, which keeps

“It’s wholly its own organism, which keeps it exciting.” —K.B. Carréducker, shoemakers
On the wall behind a workbench at Carréducker, the company founded by Deborah Carré and James Ducker in 2004 to make handsewn shoes, is a pegboard featuring the tools of their trade. There are lasting pliers, feathering knives, burnishing irons, and the brilliantly named fudge wheel, a stitch-marking tool.

Nearby there’s a vitrine of maquettes showing different stitch constructions, from blind welt to Norwegian welting. In all, there are 200 steps in making a shoe, says Carré, and how each is executed affects the final balance, proportions and look. They make everything here, from walking boots and derbies to Oxfords and sneakers. Carré describes their house style as magpie, which reflects the fact that each design is led by their client’s tastes and preferences.

Not a lot has changed in the craft since the Worshipful Company of Cordwainers was granted ordinances in the City of London in 1272; even the business duo’s preferred oak-bark-tanned leather comes from J & FJ Baker in Colyton, Devon, where there has been tanning on site since Roman times. Alongside making bespoke shoes for private clients, the pair also run workshops and courses for amateurs and wannabe shoe-makers in their studio in the Oxo Tower on the Thames.

Our students are attracted by the mindfulness,

“Our students are attracted by the mindfulness, the focus, the concentration, the mental health benefits of working with their hands,” says Carré. —C.C. Tuesday Riddell, lacquerwork artist
Odes to the romance, mysteries, and beguiling savagery of nature are abundant in Tuesday Riddell’s studio on the banks of south London’s River Wandle. The space is peppered with shells, leaves, and feathers mingling with jars of richly colored pigments; booklets of gossamer-thin gold and silver leaf; charcoal sketches depicting black cats and earthworms tumbling from seething soil (“five-minute works to get my creative flow moving”); and weathered copies of Angela Carter’s gloriously dark, folklore-twisting novels.

Renowned for the endangered, conservation craft of Japanning (lacquerwork), Riddell has always found inspiration in the natural world’s sublimely lethal majesty. “I’m fascinated by the tension between the fragility and the horror of nature. Anything too pleasant feels stale.” This skill, which she learnt during a Painter-Stainers decorative surfaces fellowship at the City & Guilds of London Art School, involves applying 30 to 40 layers of black lacquer—composed of shellac (natural resin) and pigments—to boards, building intense depth.

It’s a long process: sanding in between every five or 10 layers, rendering them flush for the next application. Extended drying times mean Riddell often has up to 30 artworks in progress. The final, pictorial element becomes highly nerve-racking—an incorrect stroke can obliterate months of preparation, but the risk, she says, is worth it: “No other process fully captures what I’m imagining.

It’s like subconsciously knowing a language you somehow

It’s like subconsciously knowing a language you somehow magically speak.” —K.B. Kyriacos Hadjikyriacou, pleater
Secluded in a vast hangar on an industrial estate in the north London neighborhood of Tottenham, Kyriacos Hadjikyriacou, the UK’s most revered pleater, is working among a shadowy horde of industrial machinery (“some can create 1,500 styles, others just one”), a towering backdrop of fabric bolts, and two gleaming steel steam boxes that hold court like bonfire-powered beach huts.

There are also reams of delicate textiles, artfully gathered, ruched, scored, and creased (designs can be machine-birthed and hand-finished, and vice versa). The dichotomy of his work—clients include students, hair academies, and high-profile fashion houses such as Alexander McQueen and Victoria Beckham—demands both technical acumen (his career began in hydroponics and agricultural engineering) and a craftsman’s dexterity.

“Pleating is geometry. If you don’t know geometry, you’re a folder, not a pleater,” says Hadjikyriacou. Now in his late 70s, original inventions are key to Hadjikyriacou’s success, alongside precision replicas. One of his favorite concoctions is a white satin crown-pleated coffin inlay, “a design so unusual it took a year to develop.” Inspiration lies everywhere: honeycombs, mushroom innards, hieroglyphics.

If you can think it, you can do

“If you can think it, you can do it.” —K.B. Manuel Mazzotti, bookbinder
Located in an unassuming east London residential complex, the studio of award-winning bookbinder Manuel Mazzotti is a hive of carefully controlled creative chaos. He is a virtuoso in finding new ways to bind, cover, and encase printed material (books, but often in unconventional form), and signs of an impatient mind relentlessly in prototyping mode abound: a sprawling plan chest strewn with mid-assemblage projects; plotters (for precision cutting); bone folders (for creasing); and Japanese stepped rulers beloved by Mazzotti for “their simple effective clarity.” Images from favorite works crowd the walls and a circa-1910 heat press (refurbished to run on electricity) sits majestically in the corner while a pair of Japanese Daruma dolls—talismans of goal setting—keep watch.

Both aesthetician and technician, Italian-born Mazzotti studied mechanical engineering then transportation design before going to Switzerland’s prestigious Centro del Bel Libro to learn bookbinding. He famously uses challenging materials (recently, Carrara marble) and wildly proportioned designs—such as the supersized “clamshell” format for artist Hormazd Narielwalla’s Sky in a Box—in his creations.

His personal work teases the dichotomy of raw, salvaged materials with pristine detailing, emphasizing physical nuance. An avid book collector who scours bookshops for special editions like others hunt rare vinyl, Mazzotti is emphatic about their emotional magnetism, noting a rising appetite from creative agencies, artists, and families reimagining heirlooms. “Books are powerful objects,” he says.

They’ve always represented knowledge and status, but now,

“They’ve always represented knowledge and status, but now, as we question what will remain of our digital footprint in 100 years, they also mean continuity.” —K.B. Clio Peppiatt, fashion designer
Clio Peppiatt’s inaugural Knightsbridge flagship is a boudoir of a boutique birthed with modern showgirls in mind. Seashell cocktail goblets, sumptuous carpets, and soft fabric wall drapes in dreamy baby blue evoke silver screen-era Vegas.

They create a cinematic backdrop for contour-caressing bridal and evening wear embellished head to hem in traditional Tambour beading and hand-embroidery. Modern heirlooms are devoted to the joy of dressing up. “I see my pieces as wearable art that celebrates the wearer,” says Peppiatt. Minidresses contain approximately 250,000 recycled glass beads; long dresses half a million.

It’s all steeped in a familial legacy of female entrepreneurialism stretching back eight generations. Peppiatt’s great-grandmother, the first in the lineage to professionalize crafting, was a lacemaker specializing in women’s gloves, and Peppiatt’s grandmother taught her artisanal embroidery skills. Peppiatt hand-draws and paints every design—often playful motifs such as coral reefs and cactus-bearing desertscapes—in her west London studio, and collaborates with a Mumbai-based atelier on everything from prototypes to final pieces, “because their skills are like nothing else.” Those designs become marks on tracing paper via a “tattoo-gun-style holepunch,” are stretched across a table-sized embroidery loom, then worked on from underneath using a hooked needle.

It’s very intuitive, she explains, because you can’t

“It’s very intuitive,” she explains, “because you can’t see your hands while working.” Has her label’s sensibility changed since its 2015 inception? “It still has a maximalist spirit, but with joy and a sense of femininity that is felt not performed.” —K.B. Find the makers
London is a sprawling city best explored over several days with an itinerary structured around its cardinal directions: In West London, Allyson Williams stitches her Carnival costumes at Yaa Centre on the fringes of movie-famous Notting Hill, and Clio Peppiatt creates her beaded party dresses in Knightsbridge; perfumer Maya Njie operates out of East London’s trendy Shoreditch, Manuel Mazzotti binds books in Stratford, and Bellerby & Co.’s globes are constructed in nearby Stoke Newington; in South London, Tuesday Riddell executes her lacquerwork along the River Wandle, glassblower Michael Ruh forges his creations in Tulse Hill near bucolic Dulwich, the Blenheim Forge trio weld their knives in vibrant Peckham, Mary Wing To makes her whips in Croydon, Rian Kanduth gilds in Kennington, and Kaori Tatebayashi produces her delicate ceramics in artsy Deptford, where Darren Appiagyei also makes his wood sculptures.

Pleater Kyriacos Hadjikyriacou, meanwhile, crafts his textiles in the north London neighborhood of Tottenham. The most storied workshops are in the center: Lock & Co. Hatters is in St. James’s; Anderson & Sheppard tailors suits in Mayfair; Hand & Lock embroiders in nearby FitzroSouthbank; and Ella Merriman weaves her baskets in neighboring Bloomsbury

Where to stay
A short walk from Savile Row, The Chancery Rosewood is housed within the former US embassy—designed by Finnish American modernist architect Eero Saarinen and reimagined by David Chipperfield Architects—and features five restaurants, as well as Theodore Roszak’s looming gilded eagle, a remnant of its embassy years. Next to Notting Hill, Six Senses London, the wellness-driven brand’s third foray into an urban setting, is in Bayswater’s historic Whiteley building with a state-of-the-art wellness program, Finnish sauna, and swimming pool, and is decorated with more than a thousand live plants.

Six-foot pink elephants greet guests at the doors of Broadwick Soho’s maximalist enclave designed by Martin Brudnizki. Rooms are decorated with minibars crafted in Jaipur, flamboyantly upholstered chairs, Murano-glass chandeliers, and marbled wallpapern the September/October 2026 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here

Source: www.cntraveler.com