A 1966 Routemaster bus has become Dynamic’s showroom, and it’s not staying in one place. The company, which manufactures soft seating and acoustic products at its Northampton facility, has converted the vintage double-decker into a mobile display space it calls the Dynamibus. This September, it will park outside House of ICON at Shoreditch Town Hall during Shoreditch Design Week, running from the 15th through the 17th.
A different kind of showroom
Dynamic has traded from Northampton for twenty years and sells exclusively through the trade, never direct to consumers. Its furniture is designed and manufactured at that single site, while 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 traditional approach would be a fixed showroom, ideally somewhere near Clerkenwell. Verlander went a different direction.
“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.”
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The bus itself makes the point
The exterior remains untouched, down to the open platform at the back. The interior was stripped back to the shell and refitted as a showroom, with soft seating and height-adjustable desking on the lower deck. The upper deck is given over entirely to task and operator chairs.
Most of the difficulty came from the wheel arches, which intrude into the lower deck at roughly the point where seating had to go. Dynamic built 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.”
What the company learned through the conversion reflects the broader principle behind its furniture line. Almost every major component on the bus has been swapped out at least once, the engine twice. A vehicle built in May 1966 is still working in 2026 because 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 follows the same logic. Units move between configurations as layouts change. Covers come off to be recovered rather than retired. The soft seating carries a ten-year guarantee.
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“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.”
The bus demonstrates this principle in ways that a conventional showroom cannot. Every repair it has needed over six decades required someone to figure out how to access and replace individual components without discarding the whole. That thinking shaped how the furniture is built now.
For three days in September, the Dynamibus becomes Dynamic’s London address. Visitors can climb aboard and take a seat rather than relying on photographs and specifications.
The Dynamibus will be parked outside House of ICON at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT, from 15 to 17 September. More information on Dynamic’s full range is available on the company’s website.
