Good design should be circular design. A simple statement and fact, and this is what The Home of Sustainable Things (HOST), a London homeware shop, stands by. Trying to deliver a more conscious connection to consumption, the shop makes a bold claim to be the first of its kind, boasting a broad and deep range of truly sustainable manufactured products from around the world.
Take a look inside The Home of Sustainable Things
Petko Tashev and Desislava Vangelova launched HOST initially as a pop-up in 2018, on Islington’s Barnsbury Street. Their more permanent venture today consists of around 40 multidisciplinary designers, each practising circular design principles, hand-picked by the co-founders for a combination of ethics, beauty and integrity.
Part of the product selection includes London-based French designer Micaella Pedros, whose focus is on reimagining waste. Pedros has designed a collection of objects from reclaimed wooden offcuts, held together with repurposed and reformed plastic bottles.
Belgian designer Marjike Jans creates works from post-consumer waste such as coffee grounds, turning them into ceiling pendants. Glass from discarded fridges, washing machines, and microwaves in the hands of Studio Plastique become hand-blown vases, while WA-MA has turned 200kg of locally procured waste metal into a range of tableware.
Always inspired by working with likeminded designers, Tashev and Vangelova told Wallpaper*, 'The only commonalities across all our designers we work with is they share our commitment to circularity and the genesis is a brilliant idea, that reimagines "waste" as a valuable resource. [They create] not only aesthetically beautiful but useful everyday objects without putting more strain on global resources, objects that derive from spent coffee grounds, egg shells, and old newspapers. When it’s done best it stimulates a conversation of the commodity for new applications.'
Perhaps the most extreme repurposing is by product designer Ella Einhell, who uses animal bones from slaughter houses and turns them into lampshades and vases. Tashev and Vangelova explained, 'As our community grows we see an even broader range of ingenuity and innovation which we support harness and cultivate, it’s endlessly exciting.' HOST is not just a beautiful store of circular designs for the home, it is a repository of fascinating stories about the potential of design to address systemic change in ingenious ways.
