Georgia Merritt's Refrain Brings Faux-Marble Furniture to Hackney

Designer Georgia Merritt has opened Refrain, her second solo show at east London antiques dealer M Kardana, running from 9 to 31 October 2026. The exhibition gathers five sculptural furniture pieces informed by 18th-century architectural mouldings and musical staves.

M Kardana, a 20th-century antiques shop on Hackney Road, was stripped back to form a gallery setting for the works. Merritt, who was featured in Dezeen's Dispatch lineup of London's rising design talents during London Design Festival, sees the venue as part of the argument.

"My pieces can be read as furniture, but equally as sculptures, or propositions for an interior," Merritt told Dezeen. "Showing them at M Kardana, within the context of an antiques dealer, plays on that ambiguity."

What's on display?

The five pieces share a design logic rooted in the precision of musical notation and architecture.

• A slim wall-mounted mirror flanked by two black lacquered doors that open on full-length piano hinges.
• A hand-formed wire floor lamp encased in an ellipsoid shade of silk organza overlaid with gazar, set atop a stainless steel frame with a central rectilinear tray.
• Underscore, a sweeping bench carved from sapele wood, supported by a single leg at one end and resting against a wall at the other.
• A low-slung glass table topped with an ivory silk canopy clamped to the upper panes with stainless-steel arms.
• A full-length mirror in black lacquer, also fastened with piano hinges.

The bench is the clearest expression of the show's musical theme. Merritt wanted to visually interpret a glissando — the slide from one note to the next. "The bench's profile recalls both Georgian architectural mouldings and the parallel lines of a musical stave," she said. A glass tablet fitted atop the bench's single leg was chosen to echo a magnifying glass or other "apparatus for observation or examination".

How does birchwood pass for stone?

The hinged mirror's doors look like solid stone but are made of birchwood. Merritt paints the timber by hand in a granular, trompe l'œil process that produces faux marble. She developed the technique during a gilding apprenticeship she completed in 2020, when she was struggling to find work as a fine art graduate.

That origin matters to how the show reads. A craft learned as a fallback now anchors pieces that sit deliberately between categories — which is exactly why an antiques shop, rather than a white cube, suits them.

Of the all-black mirror, Merritt said: "When closed, the mirror's doors form a monolithic, modernist silhouette."

A practice between art and design

Refrain follows Merritt's first show at M Kardana, Vague Precision, in 2023. She defines her practice as art as much as design, and says the boundary keeps shifting.

"I think I'm continually working towards expressing something that I can sense quite clearly but can't necessarily define," she said. "With this exhibition, I feel a little closer to it."

She builds that uncertainty into the objects themselves. Merritt said she's interested in pieces with an "ability to move between different contexts, whether that's a gallery, a domestic interior, or somewhere else".

"I like the idea that their identity might shift slightly depending on where they're placed," she said.

Merritt also showed with the Max Radford Gallery presentation at London's Collect fair in February. Photography for Refrain is by Tazy Jessett Nash. The show runs at M Kardana, 188A Hackney Road, London E2 7QL, through 31 October — and its shop-context framing suggests the pieces may read differently again wherever they land next.