Growing up in Singapore, I watched the old fabric of the city disappear before my eyes. You would pass a row of charmingly faded shophouses covered in the signs of long occupation and, a week later, you would find a pile of rubble. It gave me the sense that everything can be viewed as ephemeral, even bricks and mortar. Singapore wanted to be modern and it was out with the past and in with the new. I spent my time as a child seeking out old things, drawn to their particular beauty in a city that seemed to care little for them, trying to understand their story – why they were made and who made them.
When I came back to England for school aged 11, I was surrounded by old buildings and it surprised me how you could suddenly come across an unimaginably old abbey or Castle in the middle of a rather humdrum urban context, preserved but perhaps not presented at its best. Britain has a great love of its past – William Morris and any number of historic preservation societies attest to this – but there’s also a strain of pastiche that is, at times, mixed with messianic modernism, each in turn becoming reactionary to the other.
I saw as a child how historic global trade informed so many designs and patterns – from ceramics or sculpture through to fabrics. I’ve never been one for a purist approach; I’m not sure it’s actually possible without getting very po-faced. ‘How then do you stop an interior becoming an irrational free-for-all?’ I hear you ask. The key to the process is synthesis. It is not about attempting to crib multiple images in our digital age and create an interior like a series of slides.
For me, it is about finding a story and then checking off your decisions along the way against that. When I start working with a client, we spend a good amount of time finding the story of the space. This could be a cottage with the life of some eccentric dowager decanted into it; a set of rooms reworked à la Syrie Maugham for a confirmed bachelor; or a large, 19th-century house long occupied and extended by a single family, encompassing the 1840s, 1900s and 1950s.
I often use multiple sources in my work. These can be diverse – a combination, say, of Verner Panton and James Bidgood. A modernist master and a cult cinematographer obsessed with Victoriana might not seem happy bedfellows, but for me their approach to refracting light off strong colours has an analogy.
I enjoy the dramatic possibility of a space just as much as the practical planning of it. It might be a question of thinking about how I want someone to feel passing through an interior – like Marlene Dietrich emerging through a curtained proscenium arch, instead of simply passing along a landing in a typical north London terrace every morning. Equally painting influences my work, from colour punctuation – a red frame or a turquoise vase – to whole room schemes.
For a current project, we took the colours of René Magritte’s painting La Voix du Silence as the inspiration for our palette, then we started weaving various other stories through it: old wood from a demolished Welsh chapel; coordinating elements of architecture and furniture through a single paint colour that was inspired by a bedroom in a Scottish castle; recalling the view from a doorway of the light falling sideways across a piece of furniture in a medieval house in Cairo.
I do like the intellectual aspects of a design and its sources, but ultimately I would say the key is enjoyment. So really it is about finding that – keeping it light-hearted rather than studied. You want a space to be joyful to occupy and that is what I try and give everyone I work with, finding their story and amplifying and detailing it. As for my own story right now? I hanker for the simplicity of a Scottish bothy, but also give me Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace in Los Angeles any day.
Find Benedict Foley and Daniel Slowik's new collection of fabrics at nuthalltemple.com
