Judging from the heightened sales activity on day one, the PAD crowd is as perky as ever. At day one of PAD, the Pavilion of Art and Design, in Mayfair's Berkeley Square, sales were starting within minutes of the doors opening and by the end of day the best booths had sold a lot of the work on show. The limited-edition design sector, it seems, is in good health. A well-heeled crowd were snapping up jewels at Glenn Spiro (£90,000 upwards) or a highly collectible Judas table (1948) by the Danish designer Finn Juhl at Modernity set with 32 silver pieces and listed at £68,000. A disappointed American design advisor was told the bar cart at Rose Uniacke had sold instantly. "You just can't get them in New York," she said. "Everyone is after a bar cart. It's a thing." Or perhaps a sign of the times.

By Caroline Roux. Photography by David Owens

1 MAURICE MARTY

Meubles et Lumières

Maurice Marty is not one of the best-known names of his generation but the enormous sofa on show at the Parisian gallery Meubles et Lumières shows the scale of his thinking. "It was made in 1971 for an apartment in Paris's 14th arrondissement," explains the gallery owner Alexandre Goult, who had also had also obtained Marty's drawing of the room for which it was designed. As tends to the case with 20th-century pieces the upholstery has been refreshed, in bouclé Dedar fabric similar to the original. The polymathic Marty-sculptor, painter, architect and designer of swinging 1970s nightclubs-is still working at 94 years old.