From May 1-4, B.C.’s capital played host to the third edition of Design Victoria, a four-day festival featuring installations, talks, tours and workshops — not to mention a memorable opening night party. Since launching in 2023, the annual fair has drawn a crowd that includes both industry professionals and the design-curious public; this year, it even introduced a series of events geared specifically to kids. As Design Victoria founder and director Carla Sorrell explains, that balance between networking opportunities and more community-oriented activities is core to the festival’s mission. “A big part of my motivation is to show young people those pathways into design that I missed when I was younger,” she says.
Back when she was growing up in Victoria, Sorrell says that she lacked a strong awareness of the design industry. After initially staying in her hometown to study art history in university, she then moved to England to pursue a master’s in journalism. “That was how I first learned about the creative sector,” she says. “Coming from Victoria, I’d known about fashion, but I had no idea that there were careers in things like product design, industrial design or textile design. My twenties in London really opened my eyes to that.” She credits the London Design Festival as having played an especially important role in plugging her into the industry. “I stumbled across it when I moved here and was like, ‘What’s this?’ It was transformational for me,” she says. One thing led to another, and she eventually met her husband, Will Sorrell, through their careers in London’s design sector.
After working in the creative sector in some capacity for 15 years, Carla moved back to Victoria — with Will and their kids in tow — in 2020. Two years later, Will became the national director of the Interior Design Show. Meanwhile, Carla had her sights set on ways to champion — and grow — the local scene. “Ever since moving back, Will and I had always talked about ‘Wouldn’t it be great to start a design festival here? The city’s really missing this.'” As she celebrates Design Victoria’s third edition, we connected with Sorrell to discuss the emerging fair and its role in growing the city’s burgeoning creative scene.
What was your initial impression of Victoria’s design community when you first moved back in 2020?
I spent those first couple years back editing Douglas, a local business magazine, and then working for a consultancy that gives business advice to women entrepreneurs. I met all these interesting people and started to see how much had changed in my 15 years away. Suddenly, there were sectors like tech that are retaining a lot more young people. I saw the innovation, and a first glimmer of the creative scene.
Even still, my observation after moving back was that there was a lot more focus on the arts and the cultural sector rather than design. There were isolated events — an architect or interior design or showroom might host something, but there wasn’t anything cross-disciplinary. And I was interested in putting those pieces together.
How did that evolve into successfully launching a local design festival — who were your first conversations with?
There’s a developer in Victoria, Aryze Developments, that is very community-minded, and has their B Corp certification. They understood the idea right away. They were our first sponsor, and that was a really big deal. And then Will and I knew a few local designers and architects who quickly became involved. Michael Green Architecture (MGA) had just opened a beautiful new workshop on Wharf Street and was eager to host an open house. Stéfane Dimopoulos, a furniture designer who runs the brand Atelier Dimo, had exhibited at IDS and came on board. And Thomas and Birch Kitchens + Living, a local showroom, hosted the launch party. Those were a few of the people kind enough to get things sparked back in 2023. That first year also coincided with Gray Magazine’s Destination DesignCon — so the closing party for that doubled as the launch party for Design Victoria.
What was the reception like when you launched in 2023?
It was fantastic. That first year, I thought we’d had five events, and we ended up having 20 — with 3,000 people who came to them. There was such a great vibe in the air — people were really engaged and curious. The audience had been here all along just waiting to find other people in the design sector, and now there was this idea that we could come together as a community and meet each other. Since then, the audience has remained an almost 50/50 split between design professionals and the design curious public.
Building off that, what have been some of your goals driving the festival?
I want to create opportunities for collaboration, I want to shine a spotlight on things that are designed and made in Victoria and on Vancouver Island, and I want to increase the public’s awareness of the power and value of good design. That also connects to the broader ambition of the festival to be about every single format of design, from landscape to graphic design to architecture to user experience. Part of the festival’s purpose is to define what the creative sector is. I was really proud of the program this year, which was quite diverse.
Tell me more about that programming — what were some of the different events and attractions this year?
One of our longer-term collaborators is Cascadia Architects, which has crowd-sourced a new exhibition each year. Last year, it was Unbuilt Victoria — so, projects that hadn’t been built — and this year it was Unseen Victoria, collecting people’s stories about design interactions in parts of the city that are unknown or overlooked. Another big 2025 exhibition was put on by our presenting sponsor Reliance Properties along with the architects at DAU Studio. Together, they are working on the plan for the future Arts and Innovation District in Victoria, which is a seven-acre piece of land downtown by the water that I’ve had my eye on since I moved back here.
We also had a number of open studios and building tours — for instance, a tour of Victoria High School, a turn-of-the-century school that had just undergone a big seismic upgrade by HDR.
On top of that were several talks: architect John Patkau came to deliver his Material Operations talk, lighting designer Matthew McCormick talked about his process, and we had furniture designer Nicole Marion [who created the Percy chair for NaughtOne] come from Winnipeg to speak about her process at the showroom Gabriel Ross.
Finally, we had a few workshops, like a biophilic design charrette hosted by Christine Lintott Architects. In addition, I added a family-friendly workshop series that included a miniature 3D-printed bike frame design workshop run by a cool local product design studio, Ancord Design Co, plus an event run by my sister’s firm, dHKarchitects, that invited everyone to build their own part of a city and then put them all together over the course of several hours.
What was the distribution of these activities across the city?
About 80 per cent of the events were downtown and within walking distance of one another, and then we had three other clusters. One was Rock Bay, which is zoned industrial, and is home to a custom metalwork fabricator, Broadwell Metal, and a few other workshops. Another area is Gonzales, a beautiful suburb that hosted a house tour, a building tour and a garden tour. And then just outside town, we had a third zone where there are a couple museums: the Wentworth Villa, which is an architectural museum, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and the Fernwood, where there was an open studio and tour.
What was the biggest surprise in this year’s festival?
A really cool feature that came together at the last minute was our special Festival Hub info booth. I had a generous offer from two engineering firms, RJC Engineers and AME Group, who wanted to get involved but didn’t know how. I’d dreamt of a site-specific installation, so I put them in touch with Man & Son Design, and they started meeting at a bar every Friday to talk through ideas. In less than eight weeks, they designed and built these big “X,” “O” and semicircle components inspired by the shapes in our brand, and then stacked them on top of each other. In the middle was a rectangular desk where someone was stationed to tell people about the festival and answer any questions they had. Otherwise, we also have these beautiful wood signboards that go outside each event. Every great festival brings people into parts of the city that they’ve never been to before, and if it’s a street that is a bit unfamiliar to you, it helps to see a brightly-coloured sign standing outside the building.
This year also marked the launch of your redesigned brand. Tell me about that new identity.
Right after last year’s festival, a local design company, Becoming Design Office, came up to me and said that they’d love to sponsor a new visual identity. We worked with them to come up with a concept around the theme of the festival being the sum of many parts — it’s always moving and changing. They also brought in the colour green, which I think has a nice through-line to the nature element that makes the West Coast really appealing. All that, combined with a new website that has an incredible agenda and scheduling function, really helped the festival to level up.
Do you have any plans for additional festival programming throughout the rest of the year?
Given that the festival is only once a year, I’m also planning to launch the Creative Island Design Awards as another event. They will be a cross-disciplinary design awards program aimed at celebrating work created on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands — as well as ideas that have been created here but maybe produced elsewhere. One of our early sponsors, Aryze, has put their sponsorship toward that this year. And we’re looking to launch that in the fall.
Both you and Will are now leading Canadian design fairs. How do you see your roles complementing one another’s?
We help each other in both of our jobs, because we value each other’s opinions and insights. Even though I’m the lead on the festival, I obviously ask for his advice on certain things and likewise with him asking me to weigh in on IDS. We’ve both worked in the same sector for our entire career — in fact, we met working at the British Council in the design office. Since he took his role at IDS and I started Design Victoria, we’ve really solidified our relationships in Canada, and it’s cool because the festival gives us a very deep connection here in Victoria where we’re rooted, but then IDS has given him a cool community all across Canada. We’re both very committed to creating opportunities for people, and I love making connections, so to be able to have the network to do that is awesome.
Q&A: Design Victoria Founder Carla Sorrell on How to Build a Design Festival
Fresh from a third successful edition of Victoria’s nascent design fair, director Carla Sorrell talks us through her vision and programming strategy.