The long, long wait for Stranger Things 5 is almost over. Netflix has finally revealed the release date for the show's fifth and final season: November 26. At least, that's when the first part will drop. Just like Season Four, Stranger Things 5 will

Stranger Things 5 — the final season of Netflix’s blockbuster sci-fi series — has its official release date.Or make that release dates. The final season of the series consists of eight episodes spread out across three chunks that will be available at different points during the fall and winter of 2025. They are..Four episodes on November 26.Three episodes on Christmas Day.The series finale on New Year’s Eve.All of these episodes for all of these different parts will be available at 5PM PT on their respective release dates. Here is the new teaser for the final season of Stranger Things:READ MORE: Everything New on Netflix Next MonthAnd here is the new season’s official synopsis:The fall of 1987. Hawkins is scarred by the opening of the Rifts, and our heroes are united by a single goal: find and kill Vecna. But he has vanished — his whereabouts and plans unknown. Complicating their mission, the government has placed the town under military quarantine and intensified its hunt for Eleven, forcing her back into hiding. As the anniversary of Will’s disappearance approaches, so does a heavy, familiar dread. The final battle is looming — and with it, a darkness more powerful and more deadly than anything they’ve faced before. To end this nightmare, they’ll need everyone — the full party — standing together, one last time.The final season cast of Stranger Things includes Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers), David Harbour (Jim Hopper), Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven), Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair), Noah Schnapp (Will Byers), Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield), Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler), Charlie Heaton (Jonathan Byers), Joe Keery (Steve Harrington), Maya Hawke (Robin Buckley), Priah Ferguson (Erica Sinclair), Brett Gelman (Murray), Jamie Campbell Bower (Vecna), Cara Buono (Karen Wheeler), Amybeth McNulty (Vickie), Nell Fisher (Holly Wheeler), Jake Connelly (Derek Turnbow), Alex Breaux (Lt. Akers), and Linda Hamilton (Dr. Kay).STRANGER THINGS (2025)Netflixloading...STRANGER THINGS (2025)Netflixloading...Get our free mobile appThe Best Sci-Fi Films of the Last 10 Years (2015-2024)These science-fiction films redefined a great genre for our modern world.Filed Under: Netflix, Stranger ThingsCategories: Trailers, TV News

Netflix has not only revealed a new teaser trailer for the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, but it revealed the new episodes will be released in three batches - Volume 1 on November 26 at 5pm PT, Volume 2 on Christmas (December 25) at 5pm PT, and The Finale on New Year's Eve (December 31) at 5pm PT.Volume 1 of Stranger Things' fifth season will contain four episodes, Volume 2 will have three, and the finale will be its own singular event. These episodes will be released worldwide at the same time, and you can see when they drop in your region right here.As for what those episodes will be about, Netflix has shared the following;“The fall of 1987. Hawkins is scarred by the opening of the Rifts, and our heroes are united by a single goal: find and kill Vecna," The official description reads. "But he has vanished — his whereabouts and plans unknown. Complicating their mission, the government has placed the town under military quarantine and intensified its hunt for Eleven, forcing her back into hiding."As the anniversary of Will’s disappearance approaches, so does a heavy, familiar dread. The final battle is looming — and with it, a darkness more powerful and more deadly than anything they’ve faced before. To end this nightmare, they’ll need everyone — the full party — standing together, one last time."Netflix previously revealed the episode titles of Stranger Things Season 5, and they will arrive over three years after the finale of Season 4.PlayFor more, check out the burning questions we still have from Stranger Things Season 4 and everything else announced during Netflix Tudum 2025.Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst,Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.

The long, long wait for Stranger Things 5 is almost over. Netflix has finally revealed the release date for the show's fifth and final season: November 26. At least, that's when the first part will drop. Just like Season Four, Stranger Things 5 will be released in chunks, so you won't be able to binge it all in one go from the outset. Volume One, which will have four episodes, comes out on November 26 at 8PM ET (5PM PT), followed a month later by three episodes for Volume Two on Christmas (December 25) and the final episode on New Year's Eve (December 31). If you need a little refresher on where we're picking back up with the Hawkins crew — I sure do — here's the synopsis for Season Five: The fall of 1987. Hawkins is scarred by the opening of the Rifts, and our heroes are united by a single goal: find and kill Vecna. But he has vanished — his whereabouts and plans unknown. Complicating their mission, the government has placed the town under military quarantine and intensified its hunt for Eleven, forcing her back into hiding. As the anniversary of Will’s disappearance approaches, so does a heavy, familiar dread. The final battle is looming — and with it, a darkness more powerful and more deadly than anything they’ve faced before. To end this nightmare, they’ll need everyone — the full party — standing together, one last time. With that, the countdown to the end has officially begun. There's 177 days to go as of today, which leaves you plenty of time to rewatch all four seasons in preparation.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/stranger-things-5-finally-has-its-release-date-152255914.html?src=rss

William Morris Biscuit Set. All images courtesy of Ella Hawkins, shared with permission Dr. Ella Hawkins Reimagines Ancient Artifacts and Prized Objects as Edible Replicas May 31, 2025 Grace Ebert Academic research is notoriously niche and often opaque, but Dr. Ella Hawkins has found a crowd-pleasing way to share her studies. The Birmingham-based artist and design historian translates her interests in Shakespeare performance, costume, and matieral culture into edible replicas. Hawkins bakes batches of cookies that she tops with royal icing. Decorating takes a scholarly turn, as she uses tiny paintbrushes and a mini projector to help trace imagery of William Morris’ ornate floral motifs or coastal scenes from English delftware. Rendering a design on a single cookie can take anywhere between two and four hours, depending on the complexity. Unsurprisingly, minuscule calligraphy and portraits are most demanding. Ancient Greek Pottery Sherds Hawkins first merged baking and her research about a decade ago while studying undergraduate costume design at the University of Warwick. She decided to bake cupcakes based on Shakespeare productions that her class examined. “It felt like a fun way to look back at all the different design styles we’d covered through the year,” she tells Colossal, adding: I carried on decorating cakes and cookies based on costume design through my PhD (mainly as goodies to give out during talks, or as gifts for designers that I interviewed), then branched out and spent lots of time doing cookie versions of other artefacts to keep busy during the pandemic. She has since published an academic book on the topic and is a senior lecturer at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. But she also continues to translate artifacts and prized objects held within museum collections into delicious canvases. There’s a set made in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage, a museum in the country house where John Milton finished his epic Paradise Lost. Anchored by a delicately crosshatched portrait evoking that of the frontispiece, the collection contains typographic titles and signs that appear straight from a 17th-century book. Delftware Tiles Hawkins ventures farther back in history to ancient Greece with a collection of pottery sherds inspired by objects within the Ashmolean Museum. With a bowed surface to mimic a vessel’s curvature, the irregular shapes feature fragments of various motifs and figures to which she applied a sgraffito technique, a Renaissance method of scratching a surface to reveal the layer below. The weathered appearance is the result of blotting a base of pale brown-grey before using a scribe tool to scratch and crack the royal icing coating the surface. She then lined these etchings with a mix of vodka and black food coloring to mimic dirt and wear. (It’s worth taking a look at this process video.) Other than a select few preserved for talks and events, Hawkins assures us that the rest of her cookies are eaten. Find more of her work on her website and Instagram. Medieval Tiles, inspired by The Tristram Tiles, Chertsey, Surrey, England (c. 1260s-70s) Milton’s Cottage Biscuit Set developed in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage Outlander Biscuit Set Elizabethan Gauntlet Biscuit Set Next article

Because the Verganis love color, Menino used a lot of it, carefully, so as never to overwhelm the Harlem-meets-Milan aesthetic. A deep orange paints an accent wall in the primary bedroom, color-matched by a painterly wallcovering opposite it. The sleek muted green-and-blue kitchen is Menino’s homage to Carlo Scarpa, while the jewel box guest bedroom-cum-library sports a more verdant forest hue on its bespoke Murphy bed with a desk and built-in bookcases. An ombré teal powder room with a sculptural sink is another moment of joyful experiment but the living room—decorated with a custom sectional and vintage seating around a tiered marble cocktail table by Menino—is largely neutral.A vintage kilim rug is underfoot in the serene living room where the custom Italian-made sofa gathers with a custom marble cocktail table and vintage chairs by Jorge Zalszupin and Carlos Motta in front of new bespoke steel-framed doors to the terraced garden. The living room’s relaxed and sun-filled vibe makes it one of the most-used rooms in the house as well as the perfect space for a striking tree branch sculpture by local artist Jannette Jwahir Hawkins, says Miriam, who worked with art advisor Aurore Vullierme to source such contemporary pieces. With Miriam’s plans to grow the family’s collection over time, Menino left a few walls blank here and chose their subtle gray hue specifically to be an optimal background to future artwork.Though the brownstone is certainly a family abode, it is also a natural venue for the Verganis’ love of entertaining, whether a soiree that extends indoors and out across the garden level or an intimate gathering at the dining table with Miriam’s “unbelievable tiramisu,” as Menino describes it. Flowing, relaxing, and luxurious rooms facilitate daily life and such occasions with equal ease. “We were excited to work with someone who would understand our design vision and had a deep knowledge of our culture,” says Miriam of Menino. “But we also wanted this house to reflect our story: how we moved here at a young age and made our life in New York.”A sculpture by Jannette Jwahir Hawkins stands adjacent the existing fireplace mantel, decorated with an artwork by Faustine Badrichani and a ceramic vase by Marion Naufal. Menino Design Studio specified Tiger Onyx for the home’s statement-making custom bar and matching wall cladding behind it. A custom Affreschi & Affreschi wallcovering adds color and texture to the primary bedroom, where the bespoke bed wears Parachute linens. Vintage Giuseppe Scapinelli armchair. A painting by Ernest Crichlow hangs on a Benjamin Moore orange–painted brick wall in the primary bedroom, which features an existing fireplace mantel with vases by Marion Naufal. Sculpture (on side table) by Victoire d’Harcourt. Vintage Giuseppe Scapinelli armchair. Menino Design Studio created a floating Azul Cielo marble sink for the Roman clay–clad primary bath, where the tub is by Produits Neptune with Hotbath fixtures. The office is decorated with a desk by Hugo Besnier, chair by Cultivation Objects, pendant by Pablo Designs, and a vintage Gregori Warchavchik magazine rack. The mural-like wallpaper is by Affreschi & Affreschi, made with a custom blue. Photograph by Coreen Simpson.

At the entrance to Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) historic home in South Kensington, wide stone steps rise toward an ornate facade of carved Portland stone, with heavy wooden doors set beneath an archway that declares culture as cathedral. It’s built to inspire, yes, but also to intimidate—to display the spoils of a national collection shaped by colonial reach. On the other side of London, the same institution has opened its doors to V&A East Storehouse, with access to over 250,000 objects. The facility designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) transforms the obscure world of museum storage into a public experience of collecting, conserving, and storytelling. Like the South Kensington museum, Storehouse also leaves its imprint, inspiring wonder at a moment when public trust in cultural space feels so thin. As Tim Reeve, deputy director of the V&A, put it: “Creative industries are one of the very few success stories of the UK economy.” That creativity is being unpacked. V&A East Storehouse is located inside the London 2012 Olympics Media Centre. (© Hufton+Crow) The 262-by-262-foot (80-by-80-meter) cultural warehouse—once the London 2012 Olympics Media Centre—now welcomes visitors through a plain, functional entrance. Its galvanized steel doors are a modest update on the flexible shell designed by Hawkins\Brown. A plain, functional lobby hosts a new outpost of e5 Bakehouse, softened by new plywood interiors by Thomas Randall-Page. Upstairs, into a brief airlock, and onto a narrow walkway lined with classical busts in crates and on palettes, as if not fully unpacked, you glimpse the ladders, forklifts and shelving below, before you are shot into the dramatic central atrium—a towering scaffold of steel walkways and shelving. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is a place still learning what it wants to be. A surplus of sports venues and a scatter of freshly minted towers jostle for identity, and somehow, the V&A opening up its innards fits right in. Storehouse isn’t a museum—there are no labels, no curation, no interpretation. It’s a working storage facility, a peek behind the curtain. Instruments hang beside rows of chairs, statues stand among ceramics, building fragments, archival boxes, and garments—some visible, others swaddled after reaching their “light quota.” It’s a new idea for museum storage, one that began in Rotterdam in 2021 with MVRDV’s Depot and is put on steroids here, but DS+R are not new to shifting paradigms. “It’s an idea whose time has come,” said architect Liz Diller. She notes that the firm’s work on the High Line has been used—perhaps overused—as a reference point ever since it opened: “It becomes a kind of model for others. I think people will interpret the idea in their own ways,” she added. The central atrium is a towering scaffold of steel walkways and shelving. (© Hufton+Crow) “The Storehouse defies the logics of conventional taxonomies,” said Diller. “Where else would you encounter suits of armor, stage cloth, biscuit tins, building fragments, puppets, thimbles, chandeliers, motorcycles in one place next to each other?” These objects were previously hidden away in Blythe House, Olympia, alongside collections from the British Museum and the Science Museum—until the government announced plans to sell the Edwardian bank. This prompted a conversation about what its storage can and could be. The space spans approximately 172,000 square feet (16,000 square meters)—a fraction of the V&A’s over 850,000 square feet (80,000 square meters) at South Kensington—but it’s dense with meaning. It now houses 250,000 objects and has been designed with five years of growth in mind, with plenty of empty shelving still in view. Patrons can request up to five objects from the collection and make an appointment to view them. (© Hufton+Crow) The object collocations feel accidental but profound. What is a Frankfurt Kitchen, with its strict Bauhaus order, doing just down the walkway from the ornate, gilded Torrijos ceiling from Toledo? Why does a safety curtain control panel share a shelf with a bamboo wind instrument? Everyday objects aren’t elevated so much as exposed—invited to speak on new terms, next to things they were never meant to meet. There are smaller, curated exhibits too—some behind glass—assembled using a modular “kit of parts” display system designed by IDK. There are opportunities for the public to view conservators at work. (© Hufton+Crow) Anyone can request up to five objects from the collection and make an appointment to view them. If the objects are small enough, they’ll be brought to you at a table. If they’re big, you go to them in the darker parts of the museum. As Diller put it, the Storehouse is designed with “an inside-out logic,” where the center is public, the middle semi-private, and the outer edge reserved for conservation, research, and protected storage. There are moments where private and public parts interact, for instance in the “conservation overlooks,” where you can watch the conservators at work from public galleries. It quietly teaches that the arts are an industry too; there are opportunities besides being an artist. Instruments hang beside rows of chairs, statues stand among ceramics, building fragments, archival boxes, and garments. (© Hufton+Crow) Some of what Storehouse allows you to see is uncomfortable. The colonial overtones are hard to miss. These are objects taken from across the world—beautiful, rare, complex—and now stored in a warehouse in East London. The Agra Colonnade, from a 17th-century Mughal building, is on the ground floor where visitors can walk on the glass floor above it, breathtaking and fraught. This is a first step—a way of airing our institutional laundry in public, and inviting interrogation, reinterpretation, and hopefully reckoning. The Agra Colonnade, from a 17th-century Mughal building, is among the objects on view. (© Hufton+Crow) Hanging inside is the 1924 Le Train bleu stage cloth for the Ballets Russes in 1922. (© Hufton+Crow) Mostly, there is a sense of happy chaos, but there are moments that stop you. Down a quiet corridor sits a towering black-box space, spanning two floors. Hanging inside is the 1924 Le Train bleu stage cloth for the Ballets Russes in 1922—a reproduction of Picasso’s Two Women Running Along the Beach. “This is the largest space,” said project architect David Allin. “It lets you see oversized objects from two levels and even watch the conservators at work.” This cloth will later be replaced by the one that the tall space was designed around: the larger Firebird—Natalia Goncharova’s 10-by-16-metre stage backdrop. Here is where you can feel the V&A talking to itself across the city: South Kensington in its lofty register of imperially reaching cast courts, and the Storehouse answers with its mirror image. I catch my breath in front of Le Train bleu, first at its vastness, but then at the hulking crate parked behind it. The Storehouse is rewriting the story and showing us its workings. Ellen Peirson is a London-based writer, editor, and designer.

The overall winner has been named as oo office. Its winning concept ‘Proudspeaker’ has been designed as a monumental megaphone intended to amplify LGBTQIA+ voices and stories in public spaces. ‘The form of the Proudspeaker is composed of individual stories, gathered and woven together in a magpie-like process,’ said practice co-founders Rania Francis, Karl Mok and Oleg Sevelkov. ‘It becomes speech made visible – an act of joy, pride and protest.’ The competition was open to students, emerging architects and representatives from established firms. It sought innovative proposals for a float in the annual festival and parade, which will be held in the capital on 5 July.Advertisement The project – backed by Brookfield Properties – will celebrate the contributions of LGBTQIA+ architects to the built environment. Proposals were required to respond to this year’s LFA theme of ‘Voices’ by expressing identity, inclusion and creativity while demonstrating a commitment to sustainability and the circular economy. Rosa Rogina, LFA director, said: ‘Architecture doesn’t just shape our buildings, it shapes our communities, our conversations and our sense of belonging. Proudspeaker is a defiant, joyful, and beautifully conceived response to our 2025 theme. It honours queer creativity and boldly asserts that LGBTQIA+ voices not only belong in the built environment – they are fundamental to it.’ Founded in 1972, the annual Pride parade and festival is the largest LGBTQIA+ event in the UK and the seventh largest in the world, attracting around 1 million people. The London event, traditionally held in July, features a large performance area in Trafalgar Square, with a procession of floats and walking groups. Hawkins\Brown won LFA’s inaugural contest for a float representing LGBTQIA+ architects at 2018’s London Pride. Raw Architecture Workshop won LFA’s 2019 contest for a float at Pride in London and Manchester. In 2021, a group of early-career architects working at Foster + Partners won an open call for a £10,000 installation representing LGBTQIA+ architects at St Anne’s Church in Soho.Advertisement The latest contest sought ‘safe, structurally sound, and suitable’ proposals for a float installation that will be mounted on a 7.5-tonne dropside truck during the annual parade. Concepts had to include handrails, space for speakers and weather-resistant materials. The winning design will now work closely with production specialists to bring their vision to life in time for the parade.

The Phillipou Brothers broke onto the cinematic scene with their smash hit party horror, Talk to Me. The spooky yet decidedly fun film about kids messing around with forces they didn’t understand became an A24 horror favorite and established the twins—who already had a massive following thanks to their YouTube Channel RackaRacka—as some of the genre’s most freaky fun filmmakers. Although Bring Her Back is in some ways a spiritual sequel to Talk to Me, with both films exploring the way grief can incite drastic change, it couldn’t be more different tonally. The twins’ chilly and affecting follow-up showcases a different side of their proverbial demons, with the pair diving into the havoc and madness of grief and the surreal nightmare of being a child whose parents have unknowable agendas or violent tendencies.  The usually delightful and effervescent Sally Hawkins stars as Laura, a grieving mother and ex-child psychologist who has opened her home to a brother and sister who recently lost their father. In her first horror performance, Hawkins delivers the kind of turn that in a just world would be recognized as a strong contender come awards season. Laura is a woman of many sides: she’s the cool foster mom, a grieving mother, and eventually a terrifying monster whose sorrow has driven her mad. But while the movie is an intimate chamber drama of gore, it’s far from a one-woman show.  At the center of Bring Her Back are three heart wrenching performances from the film’s young leads: Sora Wong as Piper, Billy Barratt as her brother Andy, and Jonah Wren Phillips as Ollie. Siblings Piper and Andy are the newcomers to the outwardly gorgeous rural home, and Ollie is already an established and terrifying presence who we first meet as he grapples with an unruly cat in the echoing emptiness of the home’s drained pool. Phillips is an astonishing performer who despite his young age inhabits the evermore terrifying Ollie. His unnerving presence gives us two of the film’s most memorable and nightmare-inducing moments with a fearlessness and ferocity that pulses off the screen.  As the central siblings,  Wong and Barratt form an impressive duo, with the former making her feature debut in a performance that immediately marks her as a serious talent to watch. It’s rare to see a sight-impaired actor onscreen, let alone leading a horror film, but Wong shoulders that responsibility with a courage and humor that alongside Barratt makes the siblings painfully believable. And as the dread ratchets up, Barratt showcases raw talent while Andy faces down Laura’s constant gaslighting and psychological torture as he attempts to protect his sister from their supposed guardian—although to what purposes Laura’s schemes delve remains an unsettling mystery for most of the film.  Grotesque and often shockingly gory if you’re someone who (like me) went through a French New Extremity phase, you’ll likely warm to the horrors while being pleasantly surprised by how performance-focused the film is, only using its gore and grossness to further the journeys of our four extremely messed up leading characters. Even at a brisk hour and 39 minutes, the film manages to feel impactful, especially for those easily shaken by gnarly practical effects and movies that will give you an existential crisis. There are practical effects here that will turn your stomach in the best way, though the emotional hits will linger far after you cleanse your mind of some of the bloodier moments. In spite of all that, Bring Her Back is the kind of horror that feels like it’ll find an unexpected audience in those who don’t usually watch horror as its emotional core is so strong, and Hawkins is a revelation in such a villainous role.  In era where movies about trauma are at the center of the horror conversation (for better or worse), Bring Her Back stands as one of the best in the genre, unafraid to scare, haunt, and disturb its audience as it pushes through the pain and picks at the part of your brain that asks just how far you’d go to bring a loved one back from the dead and what you’d do to achieve it.  Bring Her Back opens in limited release in the U.S. on May 30 and wide on June 6. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.

Clerkenwell Design Week is never shy of spectacle, but this year's edition feels particularly expansive. Maybe it's the stunning new spaces, including Charterhouse Square, alongside returning favourites, like the atmospheric vaults of the House of Detention, that add extra depth and drama. Or maybe it's the festival's continued focus on interactivity, tactility, and visual theatre. Either way, 2025's event feels like the most immersive to date, packed with installations that surprise, amuse, and linger in the mind. It's also a year that makes space for both monumental engineering and ephemeral charm. The tension between permanence and play is a running theme, seen most clearly in A Spring At The Knees, a major new public artwork by British artist Alex Chinneck. Rising from Charterhouse Square, the 12-tonne brick and steel sculpture is playful but grounded, quite literally. It's built from a skeleton that uses over 300 metres of repurposed steel – salvaged from the demolition of the old American Embassy in London – and clad with warped, origami-like brickwork and bending windows. Chinneck, who became known for his 2013 'sliding house' in Margate, returns here to familiar material language but adds new layers of accessibility and interactivity. Arches span the path, inviting visitors to walk through the structure rather than merely observe it. It's also far from temporary. "This is a free-standing piece, engineered with a full steel skeleton," Chinneck explained at the press preview, noting that over 320kg of glue was used to bind the bricks. Though part of the festival, the piece will live on well beyond its six-week run on-site, standing as a semi-permanent marker of how design can meet sculpture and storytelling can meet structure. A Spring At The Knees Nearby on Clerkenwell Green, Brick from a Stone: Arch Revival offers a more traditional but no less impressive take on material innovation. Designed by Hawkins\Brown in collaboration with Albion Stone and Hutton Stone, the pavilion showcases a pair of vaulted arches that demonstrate the strength and beauty of British quarried stone. One arch is built from sandstone in a warm palette of tones sourced from Northumberland's Hutton Stone quarries, while the other uses the creamy, mineral-rich Portland stone from Dorset. Each arch is constructed from a single layer of 102mm-thick stone bricks, engineered by Webb Yates to prove just how far the material can go as a load-bearing structure. The effect is quietly monumental, serving as a celebration without showboating, in perfect keeping with the festival's roots in material and making. Brick from a Stone: Arch Revival Water, too, emerges as a major motif this year, not just in theme, but in form. Harmonic Tides, a large-scale installation by architect Arthur Mamou-Mani, mimics the natural flow of ocean currents and eddies to form a 'water corridor' in the heart of Clerkenwell. Constructed as part of the Shaping Water initiative by Ideal Standard and Villeroy & Boch, the piece uses 3D-printed components to translate the invisible logic of aquatic movement into tangible waves. It's an installation that manages to feel both calming and kinetic, gently coaxing the viewer to move through its fluid geometry. Harmonic Tides The theme of interactivity continues indoors at Light, the aptly named returning exhibition in the atmospheric House of Detention, a former Victorian prison that now hosts some of the festival's most cutting-edge lighting brands. Highlights here include Tabitha Bargh's sculptural light shades, which are crafted from recycled cardboard and repurposed estate agent signs, a playful nod to consumer excess, remade as tactile elegance. Curiosa collection makes a strong impression, too, with bold, joyful lighting pieces that are colourful without being chaotic and refreshingly unafraid to have fun. Also in the vaults, local creative studio Pixel Artworks makes its Clerkenwell Design Week debut with Feel the Pull, a mesmerising installation celebrating the studio's 20th anniversary. Using motion-sensing technology and magnetic visual fields, the installation responds to visitors as they move through sound and light. The result is a space that feels alive, drawing you in and pulsing and shifting in real time. Feel the Pull Curiosa Meanwhile, on the streets of Clerkenwell, Italian tile manufacturer Italgraniti adds a welcome note of whimsy with Automatica, a vending machine-style installation devised in collaboration with architect Simon Astridge. Located at three different sites (including Farringdon Station and the Church of St Bartholomew the Great), the machines offer porcelain tile samples in exchange for a token collected from the Solus showroom. Playfully riffing on factory automation and the relationship between humans and machines, the project recasts the humble vending machine as a tool for design distribution. Part nostalgic novelty, part smart commentary on manufacturing, it's a project that brings a little levity to the streets and a sample to your pocket. Italian design also gets a dedicated showcase via Moroso, whose Clerkenwell outpost is transformed with immersive vignettes featuring new launches and iconic pieces. With sets styled in collaboration with Studio Irvine and curated around form, colour and texture, the display champions the idea of living with design rather than merely observing it. It's a reminder that good design should feel as tactile and emotionally engaging as it is functional. Automatica In a year when the festival feels more physically embedded in the neighbourhood than ever before—stretching across arches, squares, showrooms, and subterranean vaults—this latest edition of Clerkenwell Design Week is a reminder that scale doesn't need to compromise soul. Whether it's bricks bending into art, light made from cardboard, or machines dispensing porcelain, the most impactful moments are often the ones that blur boundaries, spark curiosity, and invite us to look a little closer. If you leave with a tile sample, a new light crush, and a greater appreciation for engineered stone, then you've experienced Clerkenwell at its best. Moroso X Studio Irvine