Dynamic duos: meet the modern mavericks setting the interiors style agenda within London's cutting-edge design community

As an exhibition spotlighting creative couples opens at the Barbican, we meet the modern couples in our cutting-edge design community.
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Barbara Chandler18 October 2018

Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde opened at the Barbican on October 10, spotlighting 40 pairs of artists from the first half of the last century, displaying their work alongside photographs, love letters and gifts.

Fast forward to London today, to meet the modern couples in our cutting-edge design community…

DOSHI LEVIEN: THE DREAMER AND THE MAKER

Avant-garde? “Definitely,” laughs Nipa Doshi, sitting in a light-filled studio in Columbia Road, E2, with her husband of 19 years, Jonathan Levien. The proof is all around them: prototypes of the couple’s new lighting, with swooping abstract shapes cradling glowing orbs in layered metal shaped by a car workshop.

Trading as Doshi Levien, here is an archetypal London design couple. She is Indian, he was born in Scotland and their string of international clients includes Italian contemporary furniture firm Moroso and Danish textile company Kvadrat.

They met at the Royal College in 1995. It was love at first sight for Levien but Doshi, a graduate of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, was more cautious. By 2000, however, they were married.

Jonathan sold cutlery designs to Habitat, receiving a healthy advance against royalties, “so we chucked our jobs in, printed the stationery and spent days working on proposals”.

A breakthrough first commission was for French cookware manufacturer Tefal. Jonathan recalls their extensive research into how different London cultures cook. “That kind of investigation is still crucial for us, endlessly exploring, experimenting, testing.”

They recently painted dozens of fabric samples by hand, for example, and cast the texture of a cloth in 3D. They live in Barbican with their son, aged 10. Recent furniture for John Lewis includes chairs and a sofa with elegant moulded shells that are definitely different.

Jonathan is the maker, trained in furniture/industrial design, with an instinctive feel for materials and process. Nipa you sense is the dreamer, enriched by her Indian heritage, brilliant at drawing, an accomplished colourist and pattern maker, bringing a story and often a mischievous wit to every project.

Definitely avant-garde: E2-based husband-and-wife design duo Jonathan Levien and Nipa Doshi, aka Doshi Levien (Rei Moon)
Ray Moon/ Inside LIving

RAW EDGES: CHEEKY WORK THAT’S OFF THE WALL

In a studio loft in north London, innovative design duo Raw Edges is the go-to agency for work that’s a bit cheeky and off the wall, with clients as diverse as Chatsworth House, London Design Festival, Stella McCartney and furniture brands Cappellini and Vitra.

Room dividers made of hanging wooden dowels for Matter of Stuff gallery in King’s Cross and coloured spinning Horah glass lights in five sizes at the new WonderGlass gallery in Berners Street, W1, are just two projects currently on view.

Ideas simply explode from these modern mavericks, Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay, who have worked together since 2007. They met as students partying in Jerusalem, their homeland, became a couple in 2000, then studied in tandem at the Royal College of Art in London.

The pair have a playful, experimental approach to every project. Boiling timber up in dyes and pouring foam into paper moulds is par for the course. Inspiration is individual and personal — “it has to be a very inner sensation” — but then they start talking “and that’s the core of our partnership, both professional and personal.”

After that comes drawing and then mock-ups. “We both love materials and humble shapes and of course the modernism of the Bauhaus, so rooted in our Israeli heritage.”

Modern mavericks: Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay are north London-based Raw Edges
Marek Iwicki

STOFF STUDIOS: ABSTRACT TEXTILES AND FURNITURE

Trading as Stoff Studios, Andrew Mason, 32, and Carys Briggs, 30, have the assured and easy intimacy of an established couple. It extends from conversation through to the works they jointly create in an old Victorian factory in South Bermondsey.

She’s a textile designer, graduating from the Royal College in 2015, he designs and makes furniture, leaving Camberwell College of Art in 2009 with a degree in sculpture. They met on the student party circuit. Andrew was keen on gallery-going, while Carys introduced him to real ale. They started working together in 2015.

Their work is sharply contemporary. For example, a recent day bed in reclaimed chestnut has screen printed fabrics in the loose, abstract style that Carys has made her own. “She has great vision,” Andrew observes, “whereas I am more reflective and critical.”

They talk constantly about work and their house in Lewisham disintegrates into mess when they’re busy, with no one to get any meals.

“We live together, work together and then hang out at the pub together. That’s our life and we love it.”

Partnership: Andrew Mason and Carys Briggs of Stoff Studios in South Bermondsey

DAVID GATES AND HELEN CARNAC: FURNITURE MEETS ART

On the cusp of furniture and art at the big PAD design show last week in Berkeley Square were curiously animated cabinets standing high on improbably spindly legs, in scorched and pigmented fine timbers such as elm, ash and bird’s-eye maple, with cedar drawers and vessels of enamelled steel.

These are the work of David Gates and Helen Carnac who have shared a Victorian house in Peckham since 1999. They also have a studio in Woolwich, where David concentrates on furniture, and Helen on the vitreous enamelling of steel.

“Home and work life are completely overlapped — it’s hard to untie. We know each other’s interests, points of view, artistic direction and limitations. It’s a luxury, a privilege… and sometimes a frustration.”

  • Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde, open now until January 27 at Barbican Art Gallery, Silk Street, EC2.

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