Dezeen Picks Ten Standout Furniture and Lighting from September

Editor-at-large Amy Frearson found one of her September highlights at With Limitations, a London Design Festival exhibition hosted by retailer Aram and design collective Design Everything, which featured objects by over 100 designers. Her standout: the Split Lamp by Manchester-born designer Jake Robertson, who realised that three slices in the base of an aluminium pipe let it split open like a banana peel to form a stand. A bulb screws into the top. The result, Frearson notes, is "a product made from very few materials and with zero waste."

Chainmail ran through several picks. Design and interiors reporter Jane Englefield chose a floor lamp by New York studio Wretched Flowers, run by partners Loney Abrams and Johnny Stanish, shown at the Studio Iron exhibition during LDF. Shaped like an elongated version of Verner Panton's 1968 Flowerpot lamp, it is cloaked in woven stainless steel chainmail and tapestried with hand-beaded glass and gemstones — "a striking piece of lighting that looks as if it's been decked out in a unique style of bejewelled armour," she writes. Frearson picked Maille by Edward Milton of London-based EJM Studio for new editions label Collate Lobby: a partition screen whose chainmail slips over a polished stainless steel frame "like an off-the-shoulder dress, with just enough give that it flexes lightly when touched."

Englefield also selected Portal of Seedlings by Italian-born, London-based artist Filippo Muzi Falconi, who inserted a ribbed wood mantelpiece into a disused fireplace. Built from hollowed, rough-sawn white ash joined with shouldered dovetails and hand-sculpted with gouges, the project made the 34-strong shortlist for a 2026 Wood Award. Her third pick is Gubi's reissue of the Lotus Table Lamp, a mouth-blown Murano glass piece designed by the late Venetian Carlo Nason in 1969. Its petals use the 1920s 'pulegoso' method — air bubbles blown into the glass for a speckled, semi-opaque finish that gives the bulb an extra warm glow.

Editor Cajsa Carlson chose the Bad Posture Chair by Mara Bragagnolo, shown in the You Can Sit With Us exhibition curated by duo 2LG and designed to adapt to how people — especially neurodivergent people — actually sit. Bragagnolo created three chairs, one shown during Shoreditch Design Week. "It may not look super comfortable, but its sculptural shape and sleek lines definitely made me want to take a seat," Carlson writes.

Design and environment editor Jennifer Hahn picked three Berlin-flavoured works. Mexican designer Valeria Montero's Membrana lamp uses the thin membrane peeled from agave leaves — the same material used to wrap the pre-Hispanic dish mixiote — stacked into a spiky shade on a stainless steel base; a new vertical version appeared at the Village Meeting show by East London studio All Ears. WINT Design Lab's Tracks lamps, by founders Felix Rasehorn and Robin Hoske, are robot-cut and scored paper shades folded by humans at the Seetech exhibition, enabling on-demand production with each shade cut in minutes. And Llot Llov, the studio run by Ania Bauer and Jacob Brinck, marked its 20th anniversary in a former 1900s window blind factory with the Tilo chair, made using a technique that blasts liquid pigments at wood so they disperse across the grain like inkblots.

Features editor Nat Barker chose the Tynne acoustic screen by interior architecture studio Sistem for circular design company Niimaar, launched at Helsinki fair Habitare. A partnership facilitated by innovation agency Sitra, it uses oak offcuts from luxury sailboat maker Swan and wood-fibre acoustic filling from Aisti — made entirely in Finland and marketed for residential, hospitality and office settings.

With chainmail, agave membranes and robot-folded paper all appearing across London, Berlin and Helsinki this month, the September circuit signals a broad material experimentation in independent lighting and furniture design.