The Design Centre gives its autumn week to Focus/26, 14 to 18 September 2026, showrooms open 9.30 to 5.30 and entry free.
The Design Centre stands on a former coal yard at Chelsea Harbour that P&O redeveloped in 1987, when the site opened as Chelsea Garden Market and Moxley Jenner and Partners put up the glass domes it is still known by. Marcol bought it and rebuilt the interior from 2005, added Design Centre East in 2010, roofed the space between the two as the Design Avenue in 2019, and has taken the site to 28,000 square metres. It is now the largest concentration of interior design showrooms anywhere.
That density is what a fair cannot reproduce. These are the houses’ own showrooms, staffed by their own people and open the other fifty-one weeks of the year, so a fabric can be seen against the collection it belongs to rather than on a stand built for five days. Focus is the week they all launch at once, and the building programmes talks and installations around it.
Focus/26 runs from Monday 14 to Friday 18 September 2026. Entry is free and no trade credential is asked for, which is not true of most of the week’s other design addresses. It falls inside London Design Festival week deliberately, so the V&A in the morning and Lots Road in the afternoon is one day rather than two. The building also stages London Design Week each spring and WOW!house, a five-week showhouse it launched in 2022, in the summer.