Words: Jane Audas,
writer, curator and digital producer

An unwritten prerequisite to being involved in the world of Vitsœ is that you have a strong liking for detail and an interest in how things work and why they look like they do. Customer James Nye has been involved in questioning the nature of clocks and timekeeping since he was 13. He now fills his time (full-time, and then some) working with, researching and writing about them. …

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…

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…

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…

‘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…

“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…

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.