London Design Festival closed on Sunday after a week in which one trend dominated the city's product launches: furniture and lighting made from material offcuts that would otherwise have gone to waste. Designers cited slashed costs, preserved resources and pure visual experiment as their motives. The festival ran at venues across the capital from 12 to 20 September.

Here are seven projects that stood out.

Dagwood Bench by Lewis Duckworth

Lewis Duckworth, co-founder of the guerrilla collective Design Everything, built his Dagwood Bench from timber end pieces left over from furniture production — pieces often too narrow or short to be reused. He cut a single laminated plank and sandwiched it between two timber faces, arranging the offcuts inside so the bench "appears visually thick while remaining lightweight and structurally capable".

"This project explores ways to re-evaluate these 'un-usable' elements by incorporating them into a larger, cohesive material system," Duckworth said. "Given that they started as an industrial byproduct, it felt most appropriate to reprocess them in a standardised format."

The bench made the 34-strong shortlist for a 2026 Wood Award and appeared in the Material Matters exhibition during the festival.

Second Song by Spared

Brighton-based studio Spared, known for turning waste from its own practice into products — including tables made from old coffee grounds for the Corner cafe at Tate Modern — showed Second Song, a series of bird-shaped collectible objects. Cast with a resin-free mineral binder, the birds combine offcuts of shell and stone with workshop sawdust and thin scrapings from plastic chopping boards used in industrial kitchens. The project was also presented at Material Matters.

Tissue box by Tom Golland

Tom Golland contributed a statement tissue box to Out of Worky, an exhibition of bespoke pieces made from scrap that participants had collected over years of jobs as emerging designers. Golland combined offcuts of walnut and white oak into an unusually tall dispenser, held together with two zinc-plated steel bolts. The collective The Worky, founded by Marley Wellings, Jake Robertson, Kieran Slater and Milo Tonry-Brown, presented the show at Old Spitalfields Market.

Chair by Oscar Warman

Oscar Warman dubbed his timber chair "everything I could find in my shed". The Frankenstein-like piece assembles partially damaged old furniture, including a pair of rotten, frayed front legs that had to be cut and altered. For the back legs, Warman sourced a strong shelf board, which he "cannibalised" by taking it off the wall and using it alongside its brackets.

"By designing in this way I spent time mocking up and offering each part to one another to try and resemble a chair shape," Warman said. "I like how few processes were used in the making of this piece and the time was spent problem solving how to make them function as a chair."

The chair showed in Design Everything's With Limitations exhibition at Aram Gallery.

Fused by Audra Grays and Maxim Lester

Audra Grays and Maxim Lester fused offcuts from their respective practices into rectilinear sconce lights: Grays's decorative glass experiments, which Lester discovered on Instagram, joined with scrap metal and electrical back boxes from his workshop. LED strips pulled from old lamps illuminate the pieces. The duo also presented a chunky desk lamp in the Kiln Shift exhibition by Clink Street Ceramics elsewhere at the festival.

Graywacke OffCut Chair by Carsten in der Elst

Cologne-based designer Carsten in der Elst has spent six years working with "the full potential of industrial by-product material". His Graywacke Offcut series — monolithic tables and chairs made from rough-hewn lumps of stone salvaged from a quarry in Lindlar, western Germany — produced one ancient-looking chair shown in Max Radford Gallery's Progressive Permanence exhibition at the Christopher Farr showroom in Shoreditch.

Coat rack by Duy Huynh

Duy Huynh, another With Limitations exhibitor, presented a timber coat rack built from offcuts salvaged from the stand he had crafted to display work at his recent degree show. The size of each reassembled piece of wood was determined by where the previous joints had been cut.

"This piece is a bit smaller than a conventional coat rack, but I wanted to keep that acknowledgement of where it came from to show the idea that if we treat our materials right, they can serve us for a long time," Huynh said.

With the Dagwood Bench now on the Wood Awards shortlist and offcut-driven work appearing across Material Matters, Aram Gallery, Old Spitalfields Market and the Christopher Farr showroom, waste-stream design has moved from fringe experiment to a defining method of London's emerging generation — and a safe bet for next year's edition.