AHEC is helping design take root at Clerkenwell Design Week

For the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC)design has never been just about what is made. It is also about what is understood. The organization does not sell a chair, table or finished product. it supports a material, a supply chain and a way of thinking that begins long before an object lands in a showroom or on a collector’s shelf. As Clerkenwell Design Week returned for its 15th edition under the Where Design Belongs banner, AHEC’s participation spoke to a broader belief: creativity thrives when designers, makers, builders and the public are given the tools to understand materials more deeply.

For David Venables of AHEC Europe, the value of a design festival is not just visibility. AHEC is not a conventional brand chasing exposure. “We don’t advertise,” he explains. “We create content.” Without releasing a consumer product, AHEC uses design platforms to initiate conversations about forests, provenance, species diversity, material literacy, and the overlooked systems that determine whether design is merely trendy or truly progressive.

Clerkenwell Design Week is particularly suited to this mission. Compared to the scale and spectacle of larger exhibitions, Clerkenwell offers a more intimate, floating and conversational platform. Scattered across EC1’s dense network of exhibition spaces, historic spaces, installations, talks and temporary activations, it allows ideas to circulate on a human scale. For 2026, this ecosystem has continued to expand with the introduction of the Clerkenwell Design Week app, a new digital companion designed to help visitors navigate the festival, discover brands, access the talk schedule and save their visitor badge directly to their phones. New destinations such as The Luxury Edit at Haberdashers’ Hall, Church of Design and The Charterhouse further expanded the festival’s footprint, while international exhibitions from Spain, Italy, Austria, Denmark and more underlined its growing global appeal.

AHEC’s support of Clerkenwell sits right at the intersection of this development and the festival’s established identity. Venables describes the energy around Clerkenwell as “really exciting”, noting that creative platforms, even in a city as culturally rich as London, don’t always get enough support. For an organization dedicated to material education, CDW offers rare access not only to established architects and designers, but also to emerging talent, makers, experts, journalists, and the wider design community moving through the area with curiosity rather than haste.

This sense of involvement is particularly clear in AHEC’s involvement with Clerkenwell Design Week Awards. Rather than sponsoring a trophy as a branding exercise, AHEC saw an opportunity to turn the award itself into a tangible lesson. The result was a series of wood sculpture awards designed by an up and coming maker Henry Marxproduced from American cherry and made from a lower quality wood that is often excluded from more conventional markets. Each prize was different, carrying its own grains, knots, color variations and growth elements. Each will also continue to change over time as the cherry darkens and deepens with exposure to light.

For Venables, this development is part of the point. The prize is not a generic object to be hidden in a cupboard, but a living demonstration of what wood can do when it is allowed to behave like wood. It offers recipients a tactile encounter with a natural material whose value lies not in uniformity but in difference.

In Clerkenwell, this message lands in a context already built around the exchange. The community of the festival’s exhibition space has long been one of its defining strengths, anchoring the event in a real neighborhood rather than a temporary exhibition hall. AHEC’s contribution reinforces this atmosphere, bringing the discussion back to the material origins of design itself. In an era filled with launches, trends and visual spectacle, his presence is a reminder that the future of design can depend as much on education as it does on invention.