By Jane Audas: writer, curator and digital producer

John Harris and Camilla Nicholls moved into their rental Barbican flat in the City of London at Easter. But already it looks, and feels, like a home. Their move — and decorating the flat — has been hurried along by circumstance.

Barbican flats are undeniably a bit of a thing. The architecture of the whole estate is an acquired taste. Uncompromising, unusual and perhaps a bit brutal for some tastes. Camilla has been a resident here for nearly 20 years. It suits her. When she and John were looking for their first home together (he came to her from Brighton where he’d lived for many years) they decided to move into a new, to them, Barbican flat: “We really wanted a blank sheet. …

Written by Phil Kenny
Photography by Beth Davies

Children’s author Roald Dahl wrote many of his popular stories in his garden shed in Buckinghamshire. Dylan Thomas penned poetry in a tiny timber hut perched on a cliff above the Welsh Carmarthenshire coastline. Over a period of 20 years, playwright George Bernard-Shaw retreated to his shed in St Albans. Similarly, Virginia Woolf chose to write novels from her potting shed in Sussex, while author Philip Pullman created the entire ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy from his shed in Oxford. …

Written by Sophie Lovell
Photography by Hans-Gerd Grunwald

Hans-Gerd Grunwald’s visual memories from his youth, like many of his generation, are marked by the powerful, democratic German design expressions of the 1960/70s, as exemplified by the 1972 Munich Olympic Games and Braun household products.

With the maturing of a keen interest in the history of design and product development, he became something of an expert in the field, through correspondence courses and his own research. The chance to take early retirement from the automobile industry and focus completely on this first great love, saw him turn what was essentially his hobby (of giving guided design tours of museums to friends and acquaintances) into becoming a specialist tour guide at Die Neue Sammlung — The Design Museum in Munich, which is one of the largest and most important museums of applied art in the world. …

By Jane Audas: writer, curator and digital producer

It is not really the style at Vitsœ to blow trumpets and line the streets of Leamington Spa waving flags when they have a new product coming out. This is because design is an iterative process at Vitsœ. If something needs changing to improve performance, they think very hard about it, design even harder, and then make the change. Job done.

But sometimes it is OK to toot a horn (not as obstreperous as a trumpet) and share the thinking and process of product development, particularly when it represents more of a shift change to the product line. After all, it is a rare and lesser spotted thing — new Vitsœ. Well, may I cordially announce (ta da!) that the beloved 620 chair has a new coat. …

‘Glad midsommar’ one and all!

“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”

… or so Pablo Neruda would have us believe. I have been to Neruda’s house in Isla Negra, Chile and it’s a stunner — views over the Pacific in hues of unutterable ultramarine, and an endless beach snaking off to the horizon. It might speak, ahem, a different interior design language than the one we’re used to, but it is entirely charming.

My visit — as we were in Chile in December for my sister’s wedding — was followed by an epic feast. We’d already eaten the ‘cordero a la parrila’ (whole lamb, grilled over a firepit) for the wedding breakfast — here we were on the hunt for ‘congrio a lo pobre’ — fried conger eel, chips, caramelised onions and a fried egg. It was truly outstanding, a hunk of eel the size of my arm in a batter as crisp and light as midsummer sunshine. However, June in Chile is the depths of winter, so the butterfly Neruda was referring to was probably trembling due to it being a bit, dare I say, chilly. …

“The chances are, if I asked you to draw a teapot from memory, you’d think of a shape not too dissimilar from the Brown Betty. That’s because it’s one of the most manufactured teapots in British history.” So says ceramicist Ian McIntyre who, as part of his Collaborative Doctoral Award with Manchester School of Art, York Art Gallery and the British Ceramics Biennial, set about examining the origins of this noble pot.

Brown Betty is a product of evolution, with form and function refined over decades, rather than the authorship of any single designer. It emerged as a cheap, utilitarian pot for the working classes, absorbed into the fabric of everyday life. This evolution resulted in a teapot modest in appearance yet perfect for the task in hand: brewing and pouring tea. By quietly performing its job so well it has endeared itself to generations. …

April…

…starts with a bang. In Roman times, the first of the month was a raucous and raunchy affair known as Veneralia; now we know it as April Fools’ Day, which is somewhat tamer. The Romans certainly knew how to party. April is generally received as coming from the verb ‘Aperire’ meaning to open — in that the buds and flowers will open in this month. It is commonly known as the start of the season for planting, as the soil begins to warm and the chance of frost diminishes.

“As someone who was born in Germany, my exposure to Dieter Rams was very immediate,” said Juergen Riehm, co-founder of 1100 Architect. With extensive offices in New York and Frankfurt, business partners David Piscuskas and Riehm started their practice in 1983, from a rented one-room office in SoHo, Manhattan. After humble beginnings, they now employ 70 staff who work across a range of award-winning projects, providing architecture services for cultural organisations, commercial workplaces, educational institutions, local and federal governments and residential clients.

Sitting on the corner of 10th Avenue and West 37th, their New York premises stretch out across the 10th floor of a recently renovated 1917 office block in the Hudson Yards district. It’s an area undergoing regeneration on a massive scale, with ongoing construction works clearly audible from the streets below. The noise, however, doesn’t distract from the magnificent views across the city — the Empire State Building is visible from windows on the south-east side, and the Hudson from those facing south-west. …