‘S’ is for STYLE FILE: Lucy Ryder Richardson
EX-JOURNALIST LUCY RYDER RICHARDSON (pictured left, aged 6) masterminded the Kids.Modern design show in Dulwich, South London, with business partner Petra Curtis. The yearly show features the best in designer/makers selling modern toys, clothes and home goodies for kids, and also features kids’ activities such as Ella Doran’s Make a Tray workshop. The latest Kids.Modern show is on 15th February (click here for details). Lucy lives with her architect husband and two children, Molly and Bert, in a hip 1970s suburban house in Dulwich, stocked with mid-century designs she also sells.
LB: What’s the one (design) thing you couldn’t live without?
LRR: Sadly my iPod - as it has my music, recordings of my children talking when they were tiny, my meditation CDs plus a few backing tracks I like to sing along to all loaded on there.
LB: As a kid, was there an outfit you loved so much you slept in it?
LRR: My Mum was too OCD to let me sleep in my favourite outfits. I did love a purple beret and my clogs though and would have slept in the royal blue flares with black cherries from Clothkits that my Mum never finished making if they weren’t still in her bottom drawer with the pins in.
LB: What are your children’s favourite things that you also think are quite cool?
LRR: Too many to mention. I love a circus trapeze artist style bright green net frou frou skirt my 7-year-old daughter Molly got from America with gold sequins on, and I wish I could squeeze into the red and white polka dot flamenco shoes she likes to wear it with. She also has a few peaked knitted caps I wear when she’s not looking. And I have been known to dab on some of her bright turquoise eyeshadow before going out. My 3-year-old son Bert has a skateboard I love and I am a bit keen on his new grey and blue diamond patterned fleece lined zip up jacket.
Posted 6 January 2009 in Opinion
OLDIE BUT GOODIE: The Olde Bell Inn
By Jenny Dalton
IT WAS AN experiment to see if it is possible to harness the ‘holiday’ spirit in just two days, and only half an hour away from home.
Even before my son arrived, three and a bit years ago, I’d never done anything so unusual. Weekends away - although not common - were to Barcelona or Paris, or in the UK, to Yorkshire or Cornwall - not just a 35 minute jaunt round the M25/M40.
But demoralised by the approach of a cold, dark winter, and seduced by the promise of Ilse Crawford’s first UK designed hostelry - and also, I have to say, bolstered by the increasingly fashionable idea of holidaying close to home - it was hard to turn down the opportunity to capture a little bit of Autumn romance at the recently made-over coaching inn..
It should be said, the Olde Bell Inn - in Hurley, a lesser known Berkshire village close to the rather more famous Henley - and a couple of miles walk up river (The Thames) from Marlow, is a work in progress. The Inn itself - with parts dating from the 1100s - consists of seven bedrooms featuring supersize beds, Bestlite lamps and roll-top baths, a cosy pub bar at the front complete with friendly village locals, and a restaurant at the back. The futher rooms and barns in a large complex across the road from the Inn are undergoing the Studio Ilse treatment right now - and once complete one imagines would be the perfect party / wedding venue. Read the rest of this article
Posted 19 December 2008 in Travel
TOP SHOP: kids love design
WHILST THE FRENCH have come to contemporary design later than their Italian cousins, they have fully embraced the world of contemporary design for kids in an incredibly short time. First Milk magazine, then Little Fashion Gallery, and now ‘kids love design‘ - currently the ultimate design e-boutique for kids.
Begun by Séverine Herbeth Limon - French but now based in Switzerland, and mother to Mathis 4, and Amelie, 1 - who began researching the idea of modern children’s design whilst resident in Luxembourg, London and Brussels, the store was a culmination of realising, “all these cities have great modern furniture shops, but after the birth of my children I became so frustrated that the only room in the house I wasn’t happy with was also perhaps the most important for a new parent - the baby’s room. So I decided to do something about it.”
She has spent the last three years scouring Europe for “fresh, modern, inspiring, environmentally-friendly” design for little people that surpasses the obvious brands. In their stead are niche European names from 12 countries - names like Domestic, Ineke Hans and Fellin who promote true innovations for children and babies, and create designs that would not only look precisely at ease in the most modern of homes, but are probably a great deal more cutting edge than much of your own furniture. Read the rest of this article
Posted 10 December 2008 in Shop Watch
FOCUS: Trays of Art
GIVE MOST ADULTS a blank white A4 piece of paper and ask them to design a tray, right there and then, and they’d be petrified. Not so children, points out Ella Doran, the print product specialist, who pioneered the photographic print on table / homewares trend just over a decade ago.
“Adults do tend to get very inhibited. I can do too, but working with kids tends to free you up. They don’t have any of our hang-ups. They really like to take their time over things, and I’m always surprised at what comes out - the pattern making or the genius little quotes and designs,” she says. Ella, a mother of two boys, should know. She’s been holding occasional tray design ‘events’ for the last two years after collaborating with the Tate galleries on a couple of children’s books - and she finds that although she does hold adult classes too (one was in the middle of Selfridges department store, which, she says, was “a mad anthropological exercise.”), it’s the kids who really relish the chance to put their art work on a real-life product for the home - one that they get to take home with them.
Okay, so the process isn’t quite so instant. The finished water-based drawings are sent off to Ella’s experimental Belgian producers, where they sandwich each picture between melamine sheets, squash it and heat it until the melamine bonds, chop off the rough edges, and hey presto, finished tray (currently just £12). Once done it’s sent back to the UK for collection or posted directly to your address. Read the rest of this article
Posted 27 November 2008 in Eating / Drinking
REAL LIFE, LONDON: Anton’s Bedroom
ANTON’S ROOM in south London is - mostly - the work of his stylist mother Emma Cassi, who makes intricate jewellery from vintage lace and beads for adults and children.
Four-year-old Anton’s room is painted white “like the rest of the house,” says 33-year-old Emma, who moved to London from Dijon with her husband, Bertrand, prior to Anton’s arrival, “because it was his dream to live in London since he was 11 years old.”
For hits of colour on top of the white background, Emma has “added two coloured lines [on the walls - paint inside masking tape]. I prefer to bring colour to the room with vintage plastic toys and books.”
Emma and Anton find these “together in junk shops. They can be old frames, postcards… His taste isn’t always toy oriented, and he likes seeking out treasures!”
Posted 3 November 2008 in Real Life Interiors
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