Abstract: The Art of Design

Some people think interior design is a look.

In fact, "It must be really fun buying furniture"

is something one person said to me once.

But I see it differently.

We spend 87% of our lives inside buildings.

How they are designed really affects how we feel, how we behave.

Design is not just a visual thing.

It's a thought process.

It's a skill.

Ultimately, design is a tool to enhance our humanity.

It's a frame for life.

It's still got a really strong design quality.

I just added a note. That's a stone floor...

All our projects start with a strategy.

Basically prioritizing people,

putting the human experience at the beginning of the design process.

Each of these chairs has met many of these criteria.

I think we should narrow it down to two.

Michael, what are the pluses and minuses of this chair?

The materials are great. We really like it.

- It's got real tactile memory, actually. - Yeah, and it's quite easy to handle.

In our process, we interrogate the place, the client,

and then empathize...

because empathy is a cornerstone of design.

It's great. The form.

Yeah, it's a good chair.

- Quite a challenge, isn't it? - Yeah.

You want to feel easy and relaxed,

so I think it does come down to these two.

And then from that process of interrogation and empathy,

that's when the imaginative process kicks in.

Interiors, which for ages have been treated

as being a slightly sillier side to design,

is now beginning to be taken seriously.

Glancing at the artistic lines of this modern home,

we forget the old idea that houses should follow past and out-of-date fashions.

Traditionally, interior design has been a predominantly visual medium,

it's been rather frothy and flamboyant.

It's all about showmanship and theatricality.

Ilse's approach is much more subtle, it's much more sensual.

It's about how things feel and smell as much as how things look.

She wants to imbue people with a sense of wellbeing, empowerment

and sort of gentle joyfulness.

By many people, Ilse's seen as something of an icon...

because she has developed a whole new way of looking at interiors.

One of the qualities that distinguishes her work

from that of other interior designers

is that it's about how we experience a room

and how we ourselves feel in a room

to satisfy the subconscious.

Ilse's strength is her humanity and her caring.

She really cares about wellbeing.

Everything that surrounds us is really done with this care,

with this love that makes you kind of feel good.

And not just look good, too.

I am a very self-motivated person.

I actually had always worked.

I mean, literally, I started working on the side when I was 13

because I've never wanted to ask for money.

I've always wanted to be independent.

I worked at Pitts Cottage as a waitress, I'm sure completely illegally,

serving coffees and shortbread biscuits which had a cherry in the middle

and looked like a breast.

I remember it so clearly.

From a kid, I was interested in how people behave differently in different spaces.

That fascinated me.

So when I went to university, I studied history and history of architecture.

After university, I was the studio manager for an architect,

and from there, was hired to work on the editorial team

of an architect's magazine, because I knew my stuff.

So when I was asked to start Elle Deco, it was a no-brainer

because I really wanted to do a contemporary magazine

that was warmer and reached a bigger audience.

Ilse has always treated interior design,

both as a designer and magazine editor originally,

with a seriousness and a complexity that was arguably lacking before.

Editing a magazine is really about having

a very close connection to your audience

and knowing how to reach them, how to excite them, how to inspire them.

It's a conversation, essentially, that you have with your reader.

We presented these livable spaces.

The journey of the scene, 4,000, 5,000 different interiors,

seeing how people really use space.

Which spaces really worked, which spaces really touched our audience.

I mean, that was really my design education.

But I wanted to do my own thing, I wanted to make things,

I wanted to get my hands dirty and really do something for myself.

I'm driven by my curiosities.

By learning more about what made people comfortable in space,

researching in Anthropology, Behavioral Science and so on,

that really made me understand how we discover the world.

I wrote a book called Sensual Home.

In that book, I went through the senses because it seemed to me fascinating.

That is, after all, how we experience the world.

We are our bodies.

Writing Sensual Home was the aha moment,

because it wasn't the current understanding of design.

So I knew that my days as a two-dimensional person were over

and I really wanted to move into three

and figure out whether I could work in that field.

My first project was immediately after I left Elle Decoration,

when Nick Jones from Soho House asked me to help him with Babington House.

His first hotel out in the countryside.

I had no practical experience at that point,

so it was pretty adventurous of him to ask me.

Nick started on a path of it being rather traditional.

It's in the country, so it was going to be a country house hotel.

I was very clear that that was the last thing it should be.

It was for the media and advertising and film crowd,

so my proposal said it should be this very informal place

that you could just treat as if it was your own.

Like a family house of a friend

where the parents have gone away for the weekend

and left the keys to the drinks cabinet.

And now, that doesn't seem so radical,

but really then, it was the first of a kind.

And then Nick asked me to do the next Soho House in New York.

And that's really where the studio began

because that's when I brought people in to help me,

and it grew from there.

And it has been one project after another since then.

Cecconi's was an old, failing Italian restaurant

in the center of London.

We looked at making it

something that had the character of the grand Italian station bar.

Those wonderful, democratic, beautiful spaces,

that was very much like a stage for the staff that work there.

And an interior made with materials all from the region around Venice.

High Road House, Chiswick, was about making this great public space downstairs,

and then rooms that reflected the simplicity

of the arts and crafts houses that were all around it.

We did The Olde Bell,

a really quite smelly pub when we first saw it.

We were asked to define what an English coaching inn would be,

translating that into furniture,

materials,

food,

uniforms.

We also worked with Mathias Dahlgren in Stockholm

to develop two restaurants

which would be the physical manifestation

of his love and philosophy of Swedish gastronomy.

We did the first Aesop in the UK.

The owner said the thing about skin care that made the difference

was not just what was in the product,

but the ritual of daily maintenance.

So we put the sink in the middle of the store.

The notion of taking care of yourself elevated through design.

What we're really interested in is translating the client,

the future life of a building,

into a design language.

So quite a range.

What was really exciting was to figure out if our approach worked

for very different people in very different places.

We managed to create these special identities.

I mean, people said that, while they didn't look the same,

they did have a similar feeling.

By creating places that really affect people through five senses,

they had a real connection that was very unusual at the time.

While I know what works for me visually,

I need to make sense of it through writing

in order to then do what I do.

I need both hands to speak to each other.

So the second book was trying to figure out

how to structure my design thoughts into actually a design manifesto.

Ilse makes things easy to comprehend

'cause she's broken them down into very basic ideas.

Twenty-plus years ago, Ilse had very new ideas,

and I think it takes a long time for a new idea to really become an established idea,

and so it's been a process.

I grew up in a pretty progressive family.

Both my parents were extremely free thinking.

My mother was a trained artist

and my father was an investigative journalist for The Sunday Times

and an economist.

My father was very demanding academically. I learnt how to prove myself very young.

Because he was of the mind that humans don't question or interrogate reality

before they have an opinion.

If you interrogate a situation,

actually, the answers present themselves to you.

And my mother was adventurous.

She gave us total freedom really, with our own environment

to express ourselves.

But when I was a teenager, my mother got quite sick.

She was in her mid-30s.

I spent quite a lot of time going in and out of hospitals to hang out with her.

Those great long corridors reduced people to patients,

waiting for the doctor in the white coat to march up and down.

They were really inhuman.

To see that a building could have such an impact on the way people felt,

on the way they interacted.

It was a real revelation that human values are non-negotiable.

That combination of interrogation and empathy

is something that's been with me from the very beginning.

When we first approach a project, we always hold off what our opinion is.

So we ask questions. We watch a lot.

We listen.

I always say to my team we've got two eyes, two ears and one mouth

and we should use them in that proportion.

Through that process of interrogation and empathy,