Dynamic takes its 1966 Routemaster to Shoreditch Design Week, carrying seating from its Northampton HQ and an argument about how furniture should be built
Most furniture showrooms have a postcode. Dynamic’s has a number plate.
This September the Dynamibus will park outside House of ICON at Shoreditch Town Hall for Shoreditch Design Week, running from 15th to 17th September.
On board is a working edit of the trade-only supplier’s range, including the soft seating it designs at its Northampton manufacturing facility, along with PET felt samples from its SCH! acoustic collection.
Why a bus?
Dynamic has traded from Northampton for twenty years and sells only through the trade, never direct.
Its soft seating and acoustic ranges are designed and manufactured there, whereas its customers are spread across the country.
“You can photograph a sofa beautifully, but it won’t tell you how it feels,” says Carl Verlander, who founded the company in 2006.
“Designers want to sit on the product and push at the foam, look at the stitching. Nearly every conversation gets easier once the product is in the room with you.”
The usual answer is a showroom, ideally somewhere near Clerkenwell. Verlander went a different way.
“A showroom asks everybody to come to you,” he says. “The bus goes to them. It can be outside a designer’s office on a Tuesday and at a design festival on the Friday. And it’s hard to ignore a Routemaster.”
A Routemaster, but only on the outside
The exterior is untouched, down to the open platform at the back.
The interior was taken back to the shell and refitted as a showroom, with soft seating and height-adjustable desking on the lower deck and the whole of the upper deck given over to task and operator chairs.
Most of the difficulty was in the wheel arches, which intrude into the lower deck at roughly the point the seating had to go.
Dynamic made its own units to sit over them, cut to follow the curve rather than clear it, so the arches disappear into the layout instead of dictating it.
“You can’t move a wall and you can’t move an arch,” Verlander says. “And whatever you put in has to survive being driven up the M1 afterwards. It taught us more about planning a space than any showroom has.”
The vehicle itself makes the point that the furniture is meant to make.
Almost every major component on the bus has been swapped out at least once, the engine twice, which is why a bus built in May 1966 is still working in 2026.
It was designed to be taken apart, with parts that can be lifted out and worked on without disturbing everything around them.
Dynamic’s seating is built on the same principle. Units move between configurations as a layout changes, covers come off to be recovered rather than retired, and the soft seating carries a ten-year guarantee.
“The question I get asked is how long something will last,” Verlander says. “The more useful one is what happens when a single part of it needs replacing. If you can put that right on site in an afternoon, you’ve got something a client keeps for many, many years.”
Next stop, Shoreditch
For three days in September the bus becomes Dynamic’s London address, with visitors invited to climb aboard and take a seat.
The Dynamibus will be parked outside House of ICON, Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT, from 15 to 17 September. For more on Dynamic’s full range, visit here.
