Latest National Design Prize winner returns to Feria Valencia with show titled ‘Héctor Serrano: The in-between journey. 25 years connecting’, curated by Tachy Mora and reviewing his most unusual work.
Exhibition includes ‘Roots’ project, a series of vases designed for charity to support the victims of last year’s DANA in València.
Valencia, 10th June 2025.- The upcoming edition of Feria Hábitat València (29th September – 2nd October) is to feature a very special display: a retrospective exhibition celebrating a very special designer’s 25 years of success. With close links to Feria Valencia, Valencian Héctor Serrano is one of the huge pool of talent that has taken part in Salón nude, which feeds young designers into the Spanish design industry every year. Last year Serrano himself wanted to stage a celebration at Feria Valencia to mark his winning the 2024 edition of the National Design Prize, which is awarded yearly by the Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Serrano is returning to what has always been his home with the ‘Héctor Serrano: The in-between journey. 25 years connecting’ show, which reviews his creative perspective and his design processes through a selection of nearly a hundred of his pieces of work covering multiple fields. Curated by design journalist Tachy Mora, and after being on show at the Central de Diseño at Matadero Madrid, supported by DIMAD, during the Madrid Design Festival 25, the exhibition is a compilation of his most significant work, offering an overview of the various creative paths he folows and the outcomes of his particular take on things.
This will undoubtedly be a very special show for Héctor Serrano (b. Valencia, 1974), one of the key figures in contemporary Spanish design. Over his 25-year career, he has produced inspirational and very important work for both different generations of designers and the companies he has worked with.
Héctor Serrano’s designs are characterised by their unique ability to connect with people, frequently appealing to our memories of objects or our surroundings. He achieves this with great sensitivity and what is most interesting is that this is never due to a nostalgic perspective but, instead, to innovative vision and designs.
The ‘Héctor Serrano: The in-between journey. 25 years connecting’ exhibition hopes to convey what his approach and design processes are all about. One major element is the journey he goes on between the starting point and the result. What he calls “the unexpected ingredient” often plays a part too: that spark that is typical of his designs and can immediately appeal to the user in a fun, creative way, or manifest itself in a not so obvious way, related to innovation, research or sustainability.
Designed by Héctor Serrano himself, this show brings almost a hundred of his pieces of work together for the first time, commissioned by renowned companies and entities such as A-Emotional Light, Ezpeleta, Faro Barcelona, Fontana Arte, Fundación La Caixa, Fundación Telefónica, Gandia Blasco Group, Kikkerland, Lékué, Lexon, Muji, Nagami, Porcelanosa, Roca and Seletti, amongst many others.
Vases rooted in the DANA
Héctor Serrano will also be showing a selection of 18 pieces made as part of his charitable ‘Roots’ project at Hábitat 2025. The project was devised to raise funds for the victims of the DANA floods in Valencia last October. As well as sweeping through 85 townships, the floods left the beaches completely covered in trees, tree trunks, roots, canes and plant waste that told shockingly of the force of the water.
Héctor Serrano has gathered together roots found on the beaches and turned them into vases, for both keeping plant material and for planting cuttings in prior to being planted on in soil later. In all, one vase for every locality affected by the DANA, with the funds raised helping rebuild the area and help victims struggling to recover their roots.
It should be pointed out that the funds raised from the sale of these vases were given to CERAI, a non-profit based in Catarroja that has been supporting the development of rural communities and producers working in organic agriculture for 30 years, promoting alternatives to industrial agricultural systems. Funds have also been allocated to rebuilding family-owned orchards and vegetable plots around Sot de Chera, where 80% of crops were lost and the riverside has disappeared.
About Héctor Serrano
Héctor Serrano trained in Industrial Design at the UCH CEU university in Valencia, after which he went to London to specialise in Product Design, studying at the Royal College of Art, an institution that offered young designers of the late 90s a different model with its disruptive teaching. The experience would help him understand and structure his own creative process, setting the foundations for his very distinctive design style.
He stayed in London after he finished his training, founding his own studio in the year 2000. His innovative approach, of turning everyday products on their head, rapidly gained him celebrity, bringing him to the attention of the then prominent collective, Droog Design, which commercialised his first design: the latex Superpatata lamp.
Serrano was based in the British capital for more than a decade before returning to Valencia, from where he now works on international projects for famous brands such as A-Emotional Light, Ezpeleta, Faro Barcelona, Fontana Arte, Fundación La Caixa, Fundación Telefónica, Gandia Blasco Group, Kikkerland, Lékué, Lexon, Möwee, Muji, Nagami, Porcelanosa, Roca and Seletti, amongst many others.
Serrano’s work has great merit from both a creative and a technical point of view. As well as taking a versatile approach to multiple areas of industrial design, Héctor Serrano also creates temporary installations and exhibitions under the ‘Borealis’ marque. More closely linked to spatiality and the creation of experiences, these other media enable him to study, test and reflect on new materials, technologies and contemporary trends in thinking.
It is in combining putting the user at the centre, creating designs that connect with that user through emotions and devising innovative products that mark a step forward that the integrity that informs Héctor Serrano’s work as an industrial designer resides. It is for good reason that his designs have been exhibited at major museums like the V&A in London and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York and that he is regularly awarded international design prizes.
About the curator, Tachy Mora.
A journalist and curator of specialist design and architecture exhibitions, Tachy Mora has been a cultural journalist since 1998, specialising in design, architecture and how it interacts with other disciplines. She is a regular contributor to the El Pais Sunday supplement and to Icon Design. Prior to that, she wrote regularly for media such as Neo2, Diario Design, Arquitectura, Elle Decoration, Visual, Citizen K and the El Mundo newspaper Magazine, amongst others.
In 2011 she published her first book: Artesanía Española de Vanguardia (‘Spanish Cutting-edge Craftsmanship’, Lunwerg) with the support of EOI-Fundesarte, which subsequently became an exhibition that toured Spain, the USA, Peru, Mexico and Colombia from 2013 to 2016.
She was also ‘co-curator’, with Javier Abio, of the Madtastic! Fresh Design From Madrid exhibition, staged in 2013 at the Instituto Cervantes in Milan, and of Autoexpresiones, a small exhibition staged at the Joya 2020 show in Barcelona, which showcased very personal pieces by eight designers, artisans and artists.
Her most recent curating venture was Escenarios de un Futuro Cercano (Scenarios from a Near Future), a futuristic look at the design of domestic environments that ran from 23rd November 2022 to 19th March 2023 at the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània (Carme Centre for Contemporary Culture) and was part of the World Design Capital Valencia 2022 programme of events.
To mark that exhibition, she published her second book, which she titled as per the exhibition. As well as serving as a catalogue for the exhibition, it explores and reflects on the possible changes that homes and how they are fitted out may undergo in the next few years.
Hábitat and Textilhogar: a unique offering, drawing an international audience
From 29th September to 2nd OctoberFeria Valencia will be hosting the three leading furniture, lighting, décor, home textiles, upholstery and contract sector trade fairs simultaneously. Feria Hábitat València and Textilhogar Home Textiles Premium comprise Spain’s most extensive showcase for the home and the contract sector, configured on a large scale and drawing a huge Spanish and international audience – a successful formula featuring more than 90,000 square metres of exhibition space and attracting more than 43,000 professionals to visit from 70 countries.