The World of Interiors April 2022

Welcome to my first issue as editor in chief of The World of Interiors, and to the joy of gentle re-emergence. As we prepared this issue and I sat on a breakfast tray and headed down the Cresta Run, I asked myself time and again ‘What would Min do?’ Because I still recall the excitement of founding editor Min Hogg’s debut issue in November 1981. I was then a callow student at Saint Martins and most nights were misspent dressing up for London’s see-and-be-seen clubs. One evening, however, I happened to catch an episode of Nationwide that captured Min commanding a photo shoot as she prepared her own launch. I have a vivid memory of the flamboyant and frankly imperious figure – a former fashion editor herself – caught in the…

AMANDA IHEME, PHOTOGRAPHER A psychotherapist as well as a photographer based in Nigeria, Amanda enjoys the unexpected synergy between her two careers, finding that the latter ‘provides me with another path to understanding people – and that helps immensely in therapy’. She shot the Lagos home of architect Alan Vaughan-Richards (page 232), whose daughter Remi (left of Amanda above) is creating a museum and digital archive devoted to him. DAL CHODHA, WRITER A Central Saint Martins alumnus, among other things Dal edits the publication Archivist Addendum and teaches on the very course from which he graduated. So he was well placed to reflect on the V&A’s new menswear exhibition (page 92), which he feels ‘presents a number of things that have switched meaning over time – a powerful reminder of fashion’s limitations’. TESSA TRAEGER,…

THE esteemed Paris decorative-art expert Pierre Passebon recently made a dazzling addition to his already exuberant dining room. Now, in front of walls hung with a five-panel Pop-art redux of Lucas Cranach’s Eve, made in 1969 by the artist Gino Marotta, stand a pair of new vases by Geoffrey Hillereau, a 30-year-old compatriot. ‘I quite simply fell in love with them,’ says Passebon over the phone from Paris. ‘They are ornamental, in the French tradition, and yet so atypical. And they work so very well on the Mattia Bonetti table, which has the same decorative imagination.’ It would not have been lost on Passebon, either, that Hillereau’s vases, discovered in an exhibition staged by the young curator Florian Daguet-Bresson at Galerie Italienne last September, connect rather neatly with Marotta’s other strand…

There are worse places in the world to sit out a pandemic than Rättvik. A small town on the shore of Lake Siljan in Sweden’s folkloric heartland, it has long attracted creative types, including the artists Anders Zorn, Carl Larsson and Jerk Werkmäster. So Lars Nilsson, a couturier turned candlestick-maker, is in fine company, having just spent two years there, ensconced in the second home his late parents bought back in the 1960s, painstakingly piecing together oak, bronze, wool and globules of ceramic resembling giant boiled sweets to form beautiful and highly tactile columns. When not at home Nilsson could be found poring over archive colours and so forth at the local Nittsjö Keramik pottery, where Werkmäster himself was once artistic director and where the designer had been invited to take…

Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour is the nerve centre for design and decoration. The home of 120 showrooms and 600 international brands, it has an extraordinary vitality that can be credited to a strong sense of community, specialist expertise and commitment to creative excellence. A resource for interior designers and architects working on residential and commercial projects across the globe, its influence stretches far beyond its London base. Nowhere else is guiding interiors with such an assured hand; it is where you can connect, converse and create with an unrivalled collective of world-class talent, all at one address. Every international showroom has been carefully selected for its impeccable credentials. From fabrics to furniture, kitchens to carpets, lighting to wallcoverings, and much more, it is an astonishing resource for those seeking inspiration for…

WOW!HOUSE 1 June – 1 July The Design Centre will throw open the doors to WOW!house, its most ambitious project to date. Get ready for a highly immersive design experience; room after room of imaginative wonder, created by 20 acclaimed interior designers, working in collaboration with renowned makers and international design houses. A must-visit on the design calendar, this magnificent event will thrill, seduce and surprise. A huge 400 sq m showhouse will be specially created in the Design Avenue, and there will be simply nothing like it in the UK. WOW!house celebrates design luminaries whose work is not always shown to the public, but whose vision continues to shape the way we live. Be wowed by their originality and invention, and see how their ideas are brought to life. Each room will…