SOFACOMPANY: Conversations in Bloom | Heritage Month

This Heritage Month marks the launch of SOFACOMPANY and House and Leisure’s year-long collaboration – celebrating South African creativity. The campaign spotlights a different creative and social cause each season of the year.

The first feature – Spring 2026 – turns to the Adderley Street Flower Market, a place of exchange for over a century and a living heritage of resistance, community and memory. Photographer Inge Prins captures its defiant spirit, using large paper flowers by artist Carin Smith to represent the market’s “Unseen” generation of sellers, the flowers becoming both portrait and metaphor.

Jonno Sherwin, managing director at SOFACOMPANY, and Charl Francois Edwards, Editor-in-Chief at House and Leisure, both point to design and creativity as catalysts for conversation and collaboration. Waseefa Dhansay of Heritage Western Cape speaks to the quiet power flowers hold as carriers of meaning, while Karen Lipari, co-founder of Sisters on Adderley, hopes the next generation of flower sellers can carry these traditions forward.

This collaboration speaks to something older than sofa design. Danish culture treats heritage not as something to be preserved behind glass, but as something to be lived in – craft passed hand to hand through generations of makers, and everyday objects that become carriers of memory long after the moment that made them has passed. That same instinct runs through Adderley Street, where flowers move from hand to hand, and a market becomes an archive of the people who keep it alive.

Both are proof that heritage rarely survives through preservation alone – it survives because people choose to carry it forward, stall by stall, generation by generation, chair by chair:

The article includes commentary from Jonno Sherwin (SOFACOMPANY), Charl Francois Edwards (House and Leisure), Waseefa Dhansay (Heritage Western Cape), and Karen Lipari (Sisters on Adderley).

Credits: photography by Inge Prins, digital assistance by Teagan Van Zyl, lighting assistance by Asiphe Sibango, flower sculptures by Carin Smith, words by Nabeela Karim. Production by Jackson Street Studio. Brought to you by SOFACOMPANY and LOOKBOOK Studio.

Watch H&L and SOFACOMPANY‘s channels for the new podcast series, In Good Company, launching with Inge as first guest.