Rising up in Yorkshire within the mid-Eighties Mark Hampshire and Keith Stephenson led parallel lives. ‘We by no means met as youngsters however we did all the identical issues. We watched Sixties movies and went to junk outlets. Our pocket cash was spent on retro wire fruit bowls and painterly, mid-century curtains, which we’d flip into shirts for Saturday nights out,’ reminisces Keith.
Their paths crossed in 1997 once they landed jobs in the identical design company the place they bonded over Twentieth-century design. They’ve been collectively ever since, in life and enterprise, as co-founders of the classic homewares model Mini Moderns.
Life and work additionally converge of their south London house. In an ideal world, say the chatty duo, this is able to be a mid-century townhouse. ‘We’d at all times imagined ourselves residing on a Sixties property with a shared backyard and storage for the Mini,’ says Keith. However modernist properties are a rarity in Britain, in order that they settled for this up to date townhouse as an alternative.
Tucked behind a Victorian terrace, on the location of a former print manufacturing unit, the three-storey property is about in a pioneering improvement of 15 ‘live-work’ homes designed for the artistic companies – photographers, artists, designers – who give the mews its communal really feel. Downstairs, there’s a lofty double-height studio; a separate entrance results in the residing area above.
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Upstairs, Sixties crooner Burt Bacharach drifts from the audio system and light-weight streams in by means of the vast home windows. ‘Once we moved on this was a featureless, magnolia field with horrible surfaces. So we determined to eradicate the worst bits and provides it a 60s townhouse vibe,’ says Mark. The threadbare carpet was changed with wood flooring painted gray for linoleum impact. Neither are purists (the fitted wardrobes are from Ikea) however nearly all of the furnishings right here have provenance.
Within the bed room, George Nelson’s 1948 Bubble pendant glows subsequent to a chair designed by Ernest Race for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Impressed by one other idol, Gio Ponti, in addition they designed the floating ply bedside tables and tall headboard, which provides to the streamlined really feel.
Step by step the home has grow to be a testing floor for his or her designs that includes graphic prints with that optimistic post-war attraction. Within the spare room, the partitions are lined with samples of their best-selling wallpapers, which additionally characteristic of their e book, Mid-Century Trendy Dwelling – a witty, private spherical up of their favorite mid-century designers and influences. Keith factors out Whitby: shiny with stylised blue and white waves, it’s a tribute to childhood summer time holidays on the Yorkshire coast.
Artwork Room, adorned with an oil lamp and African masks, captures sixth kind still-life courses. Within the hallway, graphic P.L.U.T.O paper (impressed by an underwater pipe line and dazzle camouflage painted on conflict ships) clambers over partitions and ceiling, including to the texture that you’ve tumbled into an Op Artwork portray.
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Wallpaper additionally brings color to the staircase, which rises to the highest ground. As in that yearned-for 60s home, that is the primary residing space. The kitchen-dining space and sitting room move in the direction of the lengthy terrace. New doorways, in a mixture of plywood and paint, remodeled the developer kitchen into their design ideally suited.
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‘Frank Guille’s 1958 kitchen for the British producer Kandya to be exact,’ says Mark. The G-Plan sideboard belonged to Keith’s mum, the Seventies Trimphone nonetheless rings, ‘very loudly’ and the compact Danish eating desk, purchased at Dulwich’s Midcentury Modern Present, flips open to seat eight: ‘one other instance of excellent design’.
That teenage compulsion to rummage by means of market stalls for neglected gems has by no means left them. Pocket-money finds – Susie Cooper cups and orange-spined Penguins – have been joined by extra subtle purchases. There’s a set of Seventies West German studio pottery and sculptural crockery designed by Susan Williams-Ellis for Portmeirion within the Sixties, and folkish wood dolls by the architect and designer Alexander Girard, ‘one other hero of ours.’
Elsewhere, there’s a show of prized tumblers, made as commemorative souvenirs for the New York World’s Honest of 1964, ‘a showcase for mid-century structure and design: the final hurrah for the American dream earlier than the Civil Rights Motion and the Vietnam Battle,’ says Mark. ‘Each is a chunk of social historical past.’
Their favorite objects although, are displayed on the String shelving, which has travelled with them from earlier, rented properties. ‘The system was designed in 1949 by husband and spouse staff Nils and Kajsa Strinning for a writer that was in search of an reasonably priced, simple solution to show books,’ says Keith. ‘It’s by no means been out of manufacturing since, which is simply the type of anecdote we like.’
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