Design Vancouver Festival opens studios and events across the city for 11 days, including 43 Open Studios and more than 50 design-related activities.
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Design Vancouver Festival (DVF) runs from Sept. 17 to 27, bringing Vancouver’s design community to the public through studio access and a range of events. For 11 days, visitors can explore architecture, interiors, landscape, furniture, product design, craft, food and public space, using programming that is aimed at architects, students, design enthusiasts and the broader public.
DVF was launched in 2024 through Open Format Arts & Culture and grew out of the community surrounding PechaKucha Vancouver. This year’s theme is BUILD, with the festival highlighting how Vancouver can build more sustainably, reuse what it already has and create places that adapt as the city changes.
A central element of DVF is Open Studios, described as the “heart” of the festival. This year includes 43 Open Studios where visitors can step inside rarely open spaces working in disciplines such as architecture, interior design, landscape, furniture, ceramics, photography and multidisciplinary practice.
The available list of participating studios includes Patkau Architects and Patkau Studio, Revery Architecture, Measured Architecture, Propellor Studio, Studio Roslyn, Hapa Collaborative, Janaki Larsen Studios and Bocci. Open Studios are presented as an especially direct way to see how design happens, by letting visitors observe the working environments behind finished work.
DVF also uses a neighbourhood-based approach through a format called Design Districts, which organizes opportunities by area such as the Armoury District, Granville Island, Gastown and Mount Pleasant. Festival director Becki Chan recommends choosing a neighbourhood rather than touring across the city quickly, describing walking between studios, speaking with people and leaving room for surprise as part of the experience.
Beyond Open Studios, the festival includes future-focused threads running through this year’s programming, including projects related to housing adaptability, mass timber, adaptive reuse and material innovation. One open space highlighted is Addapt, a prefabricated prototype home by Leckie Studio that explores how housing might change as people living there do and as household structures and urban needs evolve.
Several named tours and events are geared toward slowing down and looking at familiar places more closely, including AFBC Downtown Walking Tour and AFBC False Creek Walking Tour. For those interested in future building, TWIG Tours: Mass Timber — Design to Occupancy connects architecture with engineering, sustainability and material innovation, while Reuse, Don’t Build, presented by Dialog and UBC SALA, focuses on working intelligently with existing buildings rather than automatically building new ones.
The festival schedule also includes a variety of programming that connects design to how people gather and experience places. Here for Now transforms an unexpected Vancouver space into a temporary destination combining installation, dinner and a social experiment, while Beyond the Menu: The Making of Touski explores how food, interiors and graphic design work together for a restaurant experience, and Architecture of Dessert uses principles of form, function, colour and composition through a pastry program.
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