Last week our passion for luxurious and innovative interiors took us far beyond Moreton-in-Marsh and all the way to the fabulous Design Centre at Chelsea Harbour. We’d been eagerly awaiting the chance to get our teeth into London Design Week and this year’s offering didn’t disappoint. With 120 exhibitors drawn from across the globe and over 100 talks to attend, the event offered an unparalleled opportunity to take the pulse of contemporary design and explore just what can be achieved with a little ambition and imagination.
Science of Design
The theme this year focused on the “Science of Design”. This included not only the science behind the makers and materials but also detours into botany, geology, chemistry and zoology. At Cotswold Grey we’ve spent the past few weeks looking at ways of bringing nature and the outdoors into the home, so it will perhaps come as little surprise to hear that we were very keen to explore how this idea has been embraced by the industry at large.
Pantone’s confidence that a bright, tangy green would permeate the design world this year was well placed. Every exhibit seemed to burst with the colour of new vegetation and it flooded the building with a mood of relaxed wellbeing. Heavy cushions stitched from brilliant emerald linen gave a botanical flourish to neutral sofas while thoughtful accents of bright paint on the walls gave the rooms a wonderful sensation of freshness. We were bowled over by the vitality of what we saw and were soon sketching out ways of bringing some of this sensational energy back into the Moreton showroom.
A preponderance of green
A key part of our strategy will be based upon expanding the botanical theme that has already been exciting us. Make no mistake; of all the sciences in this year’s show, botany made its influence felt most keenly – and not only because of the preponderance of green. Mounted against almost every wall were enormous racks laden with hundreds of swatches of fabric, many of them printed with vivid images of foliage, flowers and fruit. There were times when it felt as though we’d wandered into one of Rousseau’s lush tropical rainforests; only the occasional rattle of the passing trains outside served to remind us that we were in fact trekking through deepest Chelsea.
Anybody familiar with Cotswold Grey will know that we have a taste for the innovative, so we were very pleased to find a playful sense of wit in the interiors on display. We became particularly enamoured of a lamp constructed to look like ostrich feet poking out of a feathered shade (and found ourselves reminded of our own chicken feet candy bowls in the process). It was also fascinating to hear about one designer’s co-operation with the Tate Britain in painting the exhibition halls for David Hockney’s sell-out retrospective. For us it was the perfect expression of the idea that a good interior can transcend everyday life and be something approaching a work of art in its own right. To leave with a heightened sense of what good design can achieve was intensely satisfying.
Embraced the best that interior design has to offer
So there you have it; your Cotswold Grey correspondents are back in Gloucestershire and bursting with inspiration and ideas on how to bring your homes to life this spring. We’ve embraced the best that interior design has to offer and we’re eager to share. Pay us a visit in Moreton-in-Marsh to see what we’ve been experimenting with this week…