Stuck for inspiration? Why does your interior need a narrative?

Growing up in Singapore, I watched the old fabric of the city disappear before my eyes. You pass an impressively faded row of shops, covered with traces of long occupation, and a week later you find a pile of rubble. It gave me the feeling that everything could be seen as temporary, even bricks and mortar. Singapore wanted to be modern and was moving away from the past and towards the new. As a child, I spent my time searching for old things, drawn to their unique beauty in a city that cared little for them, trying to understand their stories, what they were made of, and who made them.

When I returned to England for school at the age of 11, I was surrounded by old buildings and it struck me that in the midst of a fairly ordinary urban context, you suddenly come across an unimaginably old abbey or Castle, preserved but perhaps not presented in its original form. the best. Britain has a great love of its past – William Morris and numerous historic preservation societies attest to this – but there is also a kind of pastiche that occasionally mixes with messianic modernism, each reacting to the other.

Sitting room Max Hurd’s house in LondonIt was designed by Benedict. “The all-green color scheme is based on the scheme Mark Hampton created for Denise Hale in San Francisco,” he explains.

Boz Gagovski

As a child, I saw how historic global trade influenced many designs and patterns, from ceramics to sculpture to fabric. I have never been in favor of a purist approach; I’m not sure that’s actually possible without getting too grumpy. ‘So how do you stop an interior space from becoming an irrational free space for everyone?’ I heard you ask. The key to the process is synthesis. In our digital age it is about trying to combine multiple images and create an interior like a series of slides.

For me, it’s about finding a story and then checking your decisions against it along the way. When I start working with a client, we spend a lot of time finding the story of the space. This may be a cottage into which the life of an eccentric widow is transferred; a series of rooms remodeled in the style of Syrie Maugham for a bachelor; or a large 19th-century house long occupied and expanded by a single family, spanning the 1840s, 1900s and 1950s.

I often use more than one source in my work. These can be very diverse; a combination of Verner Panton and James Bidgood, for example. A modernist master and a cult cinematographer obsessed with Victoriana may not seem like happy bedfellows, but for me their approach to the refraction of light through strong colors has an analogy.