Emotive design

Despite her humble demeanour, British designer Ilse Crawford has a lot to be proud of. Originally the founding editor of interior decoration bible Elle Decoration UK, Crawford went on to found her own design company Studioilse and is also the head of the Department of Man and Well-being at the esteemed Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. With a unique human-oriented, emotive approach, Studioilse spans across brand development, concept creation, interiors, furniture and product design. Crawford has designed many chic spaces such as Soho House in New York, Ett Hem in Stockholm, the Barbican, Sergio Rossi, Marks and Spencers, Aesop and many more, which are all noted for their simple luxury and homely, modern atmospheres.

Her collaboration with Georg Jensen resulted in a line of elegant homeware designed to suit and adapt to the way we live and work, reflecting her aim to place the human at the centre of design. More recently, she designed 226 Hollywood Road, a low-rise residential development in Hong Kong which kickstarted a trend against the high-density, flashy apartment blocks springing up in the city.

Glass attended Crawford’s lecture and interview session at the Business of Design Week in Hong Kong and talks to Crawford about her design principles and working in Asia.

It’s always completely fascinating to work in a new place, and I’m much more interested in working in a place than just going travelling, because you really start to understand what makes a place tick. In this case the challenge was to make a development that had some sense of soul and scale that fitted in with the neighbourhood, but also worked as a business proposition. It was exciting because Alan Lo (the client), was really prepared to do something different, because conventionally, developments in Hong Kong are more straightforward—quite shiny, quite standard luxury office.

On the other hand, what we wanted to do, while it was obviously gentrified—you can’t get away from that—was to make something that didn’t just end up punching a hole in the neighbourhood. Instead, we wanted to build on the strength of the neighbourhood and make it feel inhabited, so that when you walked down the street you saw people at the window and the building was alight, as opposed to one that was introverted. I think the sad thing about Hong Kong is how many of those neighbourhoods have been pulled apart. Obviously, life moves on, progress is inevitable, but I think it’s also possible to build on the character of neighbourhoods as well as go forward.

So what would it take to make some changes to Hong Kong’s—or any other city’s—property development scene? 

I think you need a combination of designers and clients: a great partnership. You need to find clients that have courage—it’s not an accident that the word comes from “heart,”—you really have to go for it. You also need a designer who is the right partner for that. The point is that it actually makes financial sense as long as you know what you’re doing to develop different niches and different approaches.

If the market is only selling one thing, it becomes saturated, and then you’re only competing on the price and pushing right down on quality. If everything comes down to this, it’s not only extremely sad for a city; it’s also arguable that it also doesn’t make financial sense. Whereas if you start to develop diversity—which is what cities strive for—you also get to own certain parts of the market because you develop them and take them forward.

Absolutely. They always say designers should always give a client what they didn’t know they wanted. It is part of your job to inspire, inform, and develop, a project for your client to give your client.

I don’t really have a favourite style, but I love interiors where you go in and you walk into a world that’s utterly convincing because I think that’s what’s so interesting about the insides of buildings—that’s where we live, it’s a world, so I think it’s very sad when they’re not really addressed. I think that for lots of contemporary architecture, the interiors have fallen into crap—you get the building, and the furniture dropped in there, but actually it’s not really addressed as a conscious design.

It’s funny, an architect friend of mine had worked on a big project for people with dementia. There was a lot of talk about the amazing financial investment in this new building, but she said that when it came to the interior they had run out of time and money so they didn’t do anything. Yet this building was for people who don’t go out; they don’t care about the outside of the building. So I think it is so important to integrate the outside and the inside, and when you have a really thought through, integrated, outside and inside, that’s when it’s great, because it isn’t just an interior world, it’s where we live.

We always start with the context, the content, and our particular approach is to always start with the human being. The human being is always at the center of the project, we start with real life. Our fundamental point of view is to understand how spaces will be used and how they will feel—physically, emotionally, sensorily, how they operate socially—so we really understand how spaces change the way we behave and feel. We don’t start with the design, we start with the behaviour and the life that will be lived in that space. The culture of that space is always going to be specific to the client and the context and the particular conditions, which makes it very interesting.

For example, we did a project with Soho House (New York) and developed a whole brand. Although we started with one project, it got bigger, and it was based on quite a strong core audience and core set of values which we then visualized and materialized. Yet funnily enough, the same approach is one that we’ve just been asked to apply to a huge international corporation.

It’s very interesting because you might think it’s specific to hospitality, but the same client wants us to do something which improves interaction between people and the flow of information; they want something that will attract and keep top talent, and they want it to be something that consequently will reflect their brand. It’s amazing how something that works just for the “cool side of life” really transfers into other things. While obviously the translation is slightly different, you can apply the same process of humanistic interaction into many different categories, and make spaces much more livable, much more attractive, and ultimately, much more valuable to a client.

I think it’s a process. It’s a verb, and not a noun. It’s a way of making new realities that make sense.