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Modern Shows® celebrated events are an extension of Showhome, a one-off open house event, that launched from Lucy’s ’60s house in south east London in July 2002 where Petra Curtis and Lucy Ryder Richardson mixed everything they loved from Eley Kishimoto homeware and Multi ceramics to Sixties' Scandinavian sideboards and chairs sourced directly from auctions in Denmark. Selling 90% of the curated collection of midcentury and modern furniture in one day spurred them on to produce a larger event where midcentury dealers and modern designers could gather to sell their work.

Since that time, the dynamic design-loving duo have sourced for top clients including Saatchi & Saatchi, Adform, The Modern House and tapas brand Brindisa and have gone on to produce bigger and better shows, advising TV producers, broadsheet journalists and top collectors building up a portfolio of investment furniture and art along the way. Lucy Ryder Richardson (@midmodmadam on instagram) is currently a regular on BBC One's The Bidding Room with Nigel Havers. The Bidding Room is created by Ricochet, the producers of The Repair Shop.

Modern Shows was asked to show a Midcentury Modern® Pop Up of 20 plus dealers and designers at designjunction in 2012 in recognition of the fact that, despite being “the show for modern antiques” rather than a designer brand, the Midcentury Modern® trademark has become synonymous with great style, history and integrity. The follow-up 2013 Midcentury Modern® designjunction pop up was called ‘the best thing on the ground floor”. In 2014 Modern Shows popped up at a 4.5 million property in Fulham and was one of a few select design brands, including Paul Smith, to get offered a shop window and party by Fritz Hansen and Skandium in the Margaret Street shop.

Modern Shows was picked by Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway and The South Bank to be furniture and homeware curator for Vintage Festival 2011. Voted the show destination of 2009 by Time Out and a top shop by Stella magazine in 2014, both Midcentury Modern® and The Midcentury Show have a cult following of midcentury aficianados and design lovers who gather one Sunday a few times a year to feed off their mutual love for design at what has been described as “an inspiring museum-style pop up shop” by Max Fraser, The London Design Guide.

Known for targeted marketing, Modern Shows® regularly advertises select brands its followers might be interested in with stories in its specialist mail-outs and does swaps with Collect at the Saatchi, Cockpit Studios, London Art Fair, Milk and Two Sugars, New Designers, The Design Trust, Geffrye Museum etc.

Just a few of the people spotted shopping for their homes at the shows:

Actors Olivia Colman, Andrew Garfield, Clive Owen, Jason Statham, model Saffron Aldridge, Salvage Hunter’s Drew Pritchard, publicist and furniture impresario Alasdair Willis, ceramicist and designer Jonathan Adler and New York’s finest window dresser Simon Doonan, Edmund de Waal, senior interior designer at Soho House group Domhnall Nolan, designers including Jonathan Saunders, Mary Karantzou, Tom Dixon, Orla Kiely, Margaret Howell, Ally Cappellino, Scott Fraser Simpson, the lovely 2LG interiors, Monocle’s Tyler Brule, stylist Katy Grand, fashionista Susie Bubble, Tilly Hemingway, Estee Lalonde, Christina Schmidt, Magnus Englund, Patrick Kielty, Lee Mack, Stephen Merchant, Mark Frost, Jenny Eclair, Jimmy Carr, artists Dinos Chapman and Mike Nelson, SCP’s Sheridan Coakley, Britain’s top furniture designers Russell Pinch and Matthew Hilton, Mary Portas (Mary Queen of Shops), Roger Zogolovitch, architect, founder and creative director of Solidspace, the Liberty team, South Bank buyers, Heal’s designers and buyers, Selfridges buyers, Tate Shop buyers, The Crafts Council, James Bond set designers, The Conran Design team, Camilla Nicholls and Frieze, collector Dominic Palfreyman, curator Bruce Haines, Tent and Origin’s Ian Rudge, presenters from The Antiques Roadshow, top property developers, hedge funders, Phillips, Sotheby's and Christies experts on a busman's holiday, interior designers, stars of stage and screen, stylists, top writers including Dominic Bradbury, Claudia Baillie and Dominic Lutyens and many celebrities that would rather keep their anonymity.