The World of Interiors February 2022

1 Architect Eve van Dyck and designer Thierry Donnay had a light-bulb moment 14 years ago while renovating an 1850s building housing porcelain switches, sockets and lampholders – fittings that inspired their debut product range. The duo had another epiphany recently: many of their lights are now available in primary colours and retro-style brown (from £32 approx). Visit zangra.com. 2 Looking for gardening attire, Olivia May purchased a vintage Japanese Hanten jacket. It became the blueprint – or should that be toile – for her three unisex versions (£120 each; seven colours). The brushed-cotton-drill ‘Garden Kimono’ is wide and short with pockets, tool loops and a magnetic patch; the mid-weight brushed-cotton ‘Studio Kimono’ is a narrower fit with the aforementioned pockets and magnetic patch plus a pen pocket; last but not…

TUCKED AWAY behind the bustling thoroughfare of Bishopsgate, a stone’s throw from Liverpool Street station in the City of London, is a narrow turning called Sandys Row. Here, beyond the blue doors of an unassuming brick façade, sits the capital’s oldest functioning Ashkenazi synagogue, which has been operating continuously since 1854. This Grade II-listed building is ‘a hidden gem’, according to Adam Dant, who has been artist-in-residence there since he relocated his studio to its attic in 2018. Dant (WoI Oct 2012) has lived in this now fashionable part of east London for decades in an old Huguenot weaver’s house. ‘Not one of the fancy merchant’s places that tourists and film crews love but a tumbledown wreck of a place, with a long window at the top where the silk weavers…

THE YORKSHIRE TEA CEREMONY: WA ISMAY AND HIS COLLECTION OF BRITISH STUDIO POTTERY (by Helen Walsh; Paul Holberton, rrp £25) At first glance, William Ismay’s life might be considered rather dull. An only child, born in 1910 in Wakefield into a lower-middle-class family, he passed through grammar school, university and national service in the Royal Signals Corps before joining the West Riding’s County Library Service, just as his old headmaster had recommended. He lived and died in the same small terraced house and never married. His everyday pastimes were reading, socialist politics à la William Morris and occasional secret lusts for burlesque dancers. But Ismay fermented one magnificent obsession. His mother thought he needed a hobby, so when she died in 1956 he disposed of their ‘almost uniformly dreadful’ crocks, and…