Abstract: The Art of Design (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 8 - Ilse Crawford: Interior Design - full transcript

[Ilse] Some people think
interior design is a look.
In fact, "It must be
really fun buying furniture"
is something one person
said to me once.
But I see it differently.
We spend 87% of our lives
inside buildings.
How they are designed really affects
how we feel, how we behave.
Design is not just a visual thing.
It's a thought process.
It's a skill.
Ultimately, design is a tool
to enhance our humanity.
It's a frame for life.
[lively piano music playing]
[gentle studio chatter]
[colleague] It's still got
a really strong design quality.
I just added a note.
That's a stone floor...
[Ilse] All our projects start
with a strategy.
Basically prioritizing people,
putting the human experience
at the beginning of the design process.
Each of these chairs has met many
of these criteria.
I think we should
narrow it down to two.
Michael, what are the pluses
and minuses of this chair?
[Michael] The materials are great.
We really like it.
-It's got real tactile memory, actually.
-Yeah, and it's quite easy to handle.
[Ilse] In our process,
we interrogate the place, the client,
and then empathize...
because empathy is a cornerstone
of design.
[Michael] It's great. The form.
[Ilse] Yeah, it's a good chair.
-Quite a challenge, isn't it?
-[colleague] Yeah.
[Ilse] You want to feel easy and relaxed,
so I think it does come down to these two.
And then from that process
of interrogation and empathy,
that's when
the imaginative process kicks in.
Interiors, which for ages
have been treated
as being
a slightly sillier side to design,
is now beginning to be taken seriously.
[TV reporter] Glancing at
the artistic lines of this modern home,
we forget the old idea that houses should
follow past and out-of-date fashions.
Traditionally, interior design has been
a predominantly visual medium,
it's been rather frothy and flamboyant.
It's all about showmanship
and theatricality.
Ilse's approach is much more subtle,
it's much more sensual.
It's about how things feel and smell
as much as how things look.
She wants to imbue people
with a sense of wellbeing, empowerment
and sort of gentle joyfulness.
By many people, Ilse's seen
as something of an icon... [chuckles]
because she has developed
a whole new way of looking at interiors.
One of the qualities
that distinguishes her work
from that of other interior designers
is that it's about
how we experience a room
and how we ourselves feel in a room
to satisfy the subconscious.
Ilse's strength is her humanity
and her caring.
She really cares about wellbeing.
Everything that surrounds us
is really done with this care,
with this love that makes you
kind of feel good.
And not just look good, too.
[Ilse] I am a very self-motivated person.
I actually had always worked.
I mean, literally, I started working
on the side when I was 13
because I've never wanted
to ask for money.
I've always wanted to be independent.
I worked at Pitts Cottage as a waitress,
I'm sure completely illegally,
serving coffees and shortbread biscuits
which had a cherry in the middle
and looked like a breast. [chuckles]
I remember it so clearly.
From a kid, I was interested in how people
behave differently in different spaces.
That fascinated me.
So when I went to university, I studied
history and history of architecture.
After university, I was the studio manager
for an architect,
and from there, was hired
to work on the editorial team
of an architect's magazine,
because I knew my stuff.
So when I was asked to start Elle Deco,
it was a no-brainer
because I really wanted
to do a contemporary magazine
that was warmer
and reached a bigger audience.
[Rawsthorn] Ilse has always treated
interior design,
both as a designer
and magazine editor originally,
with a seriousness and a complexity
that was arguably lacking before.
[Ilse] Editing a magazine
is really about having
a very close connection to your audience
and knowing how to reach them,
how to excite them, how to inspire them.
It's a conversation, essentially,
that you have with your reader.
We presented these livable spaces.
The journey of the scene,
4,000, 5,000 different interiors,
seeing how people really use space.
Which spaces really worked,
which spaces really touched our audience.
I mean, that was really
my design education.
But I wanted to do my own thing,
I wanted to make things,
I wanted to get my hands dirty
and really do something for myself.
I'm driven by my curiosities.
By learning more about what made
people comfortable in space,
researching in Anthropology,
Behavioral Science and so on,
that really made me understand
how we discover the world.
I wrote a book called Sensual Home.
In that book, I went through the senses
because it seemed to me fascinating.
That is, after all,
how we experience the world.
We are our bodies.
Writing Sensual Home
was the aha moment,
because it wasn't
the current understanding of design.
So I knew that my days
as a two-dimensional person were over
and I really wanted to move into three
and figure out
whether I could work in that field.
[piano music playing]
My first project was
immediately after I left Elle Decoration,
when Nick Jones from Soho House
asked me to help him with Babington House.
His first hotel out in the countryside.
I had no practical experience
at that point,
so it was pretty adventurous of him
to ask me.
Nick started on a path
of it being rather traditional.
It's in the country, so it was going to be
a country house hotel.
I was very clear that
that was the last thing it should be.
It was for the media and advertising
and film crowd,
so my proposal said it should be
this very informal place
that you could just treat
as if it was your own.
Like a family house of a friend
where the parents have gone away
for the weekend
and left the keys to the drinks cabinet.
And now, that doesn't seem so radical,
but really then,
it was the first of a kind.
And then Nick asked me to do
the next Soho House in New York.
And that's really where the studio began
because that's when
I brought people in to help me,
and it grew from there.
And it has been
one project after another since then.
Cecconi's was an old,
failing Italian restaurant
in the center of London.
We looked at making it
something that had the character
of the grand Italian station bar.
Those wonderful, democratic,
beautiful spaces,
that was very much like a stage
for the staff that work there.
And an interior made with materials all
from the region around Venice.
High Road House, Chiswick, was about
making this great public space downstairs,
and then rooms
that reflected the simplicity
of the arts and crafts houses
that were all around it.
We did The Olde Bell,
a really quite smelly pub
when we first saw it.
We were asked to define
what an English coaching inn would be,
translating that into furniture,
materials,
food,
uniforms.
We also worked with Mathias Dahlgren
in Stockholm
to develop two restaurants
which would be
the physical manifestation
of his love and philosophy
of Swedish gastronomy.
We did the first Aesop in the UK.
The owner said the thing about skin care
that made the difference
was not just what was in the product,
but the ritual of daily maintenance.
So we put the sink
in the middle of the store.
The notion of taking care of yourself
elevated through design.
What we're really interested in
is translating the client,
the future life of a building,
into a design language.
So quite a range.
What was really exciting was to figure out
if our approach worked
for very different people
in very different places.
We managed to create
these special identities.
I mean, people said that,
while they didn't look the same,
they did have a similar feeling.
By creating places that really affect
people through five senses,
they had a real connection
that was very unusual at the time.
While I know what works for me visually,
I need to make sense of it
through writing
in order to then do what I do.
I need both hands to speak to each other.
So the second book
was trying to figure out
how to structure my design thoughts
into actually a design manifesto.
[Thompson]
Ilse makes things easy to comprehend
'cause she's broken them down
into very basic ideas.
Twenty-plus years ago,
Ilse had very new ideas,
and I think it takes a long time for a new
idea to really become an established idea,
and so it's been a process.
[Ilse] I grew up
in a pretty progressive family.
Both my parents were
extremely free thinking.
My mother was a trained artist
and my father was an investigative
journalist for The Sunday Times
and an economist.
My father was very demanding academically.
I learnt how to prove myself very young.
Because he was of the mind that humans
don't question or interrogate reality
before they have an opinion.
If you interrogate a situation,
actually, the answers
present themselves to you.
And my mother was adventurous.
She gave us total freedom really,
with our own environment
to express ourselves.
But when I was a teenager,
my mother got quite sick.
She was in her mid-30s.
I spent quite a lot of time going in
and out of hospitals to hang out with her.
Those great long corridors
reduced people to patients,
waiting for the doctor in the white coat
to march up and down.
They were really inhuman.
To see that a building could have
such an impact on the way people felt,
on the way they interacted.
It was a real revelation
that human values are non-negotiable.
That combination
of interrogation and empathy
is something that's been with me
from the very beginning.
When we first approach a project,
we always hold off what our opinion is.
So we ask questions. We watch a lot.
We listen.
I always say to my team we've got
two eyes, two ears and one mouth
and we should use them
in that proportion.
[general project chatter]
[Ilse] Through that process
of interrogation and empathy,
we can understand
really what it is we're looking at.
Our expertise in terms of process
was relevant when it came to
working on a project like with IKEA.
They noticed the humanity of our approach,
and that's something that is embedded
in their ideology as a company.
They're very interested
in how we can bring those human values
into their restaurants.
This has to be a very robust vision
because it's going to be
translated round the world.
[colleague] It's a huge thing.
The restaurant is always done
as an afterthought.
The store is the mammoth thing
to get right.
Yeah.
And, like we talk about,
the end of the system,
that's the bit that gets
the last bits of the money
and the last bits of the time.
So it would be quite interesting
to reverse that process.
I didn't know it was called a restaurant.
I just thought that's really interesting.
-[Ilse] It's a cafeteria.
-[colleague] Yeah.
They can use that space to encourage
and give sort of behavioral cues to people
to eat more healthily, especially kids.
Although it sounds like the hot dog
is something that will be hung on to.
Maybe that's okay.
It just needs to be sort of framed
in a different language, not advertised...
[Ilse] But apparently the veggie ball
is doing brilliantly.
[colleague] Is it really? That's great.
[colleague] The next steps
will be to go and do
some very rigorous observation in IKEA
in the existing environments.
[Ilse] Changes on this scale
could make a massive impact.
Almost every client finds this room
their favorite space.
Each project has its specific
material language that we might use
in terms of how they're laid,
how they're finished.
Materials are the thing
that tell the truth.
It's something that
we go into in great detail.
Humans naturally are drawn to materials.
We discover the world through our senses.
What we're interested in
is how materials speak to us.
The things that touch the skin,
the things that really give you memory.
We focus a lot on that.
Materials are
much more compelling and convincing
once you see them in context,
or at least in the character of light
that will hit it,
and ideally in association with
the other materials that will be with it.
Really, it's that combination of materials
that speak to each other
and create this tactile, warm
and very physical environment.
So for example, when we were working
on Cathay Pacific Airport lounges,
you really need to choose materials
that are functional, but yet luxurious.
Now, these are people who are tired,
who are probably jet-lagged,
and a lounge is a place
to make them feel human.
Typically, an airport lounge will often
line chairs up rather institutionally,
and we didn't want to do that.
We wanted it to have the sense of
domestic space, but yet function well.
That was a challenge.
The lounge needed to have
minimal maintenance,
to be somewhere that could withstand
many, many people per day
going through with wheelie suitcases
which bash the walls.
So paint, for example, was a no go.
It needed to be materialized
in a way that expressed Cathay
and not, for example, another airline.
So when it came to choosing materials
for the first-class lounge,
in the hallway, we chose onyx.
It's a natural material,
it's from the area, it's an Asian material
and because it's robust.
It's not the cheapest material
you could find,
so we needed to balance it with something
more down-to-earth that offset it.
So we chose a limestone.
But then we needed to add warmth.
We actually understand materials best
by contrast.
Our senses are wired in such a way
that we understand that rough
feels rougher by contrast with smooth.
To get the best out of these materials,
we needed to find its opposite.
So mohair velvet,
which is a very robust velvet,
which is totally durable
but feels luxurious.
So offsetting the hardness,
the coolness of the onyx
and the limestone.
Then bringing in something natural,
both in finish and also form.
And then to bring in the touch of lux,
it had a brass base.
So it was less about the aesthetics
or the appearance,
although that's obviously in the mix,
but much more about
how to make an environment
that made people feel better after
they'd been there than when they arrived.
It's all about wellbeing.
That means that
when people walk into it,
they don't know why they feel
the way they feel,
but it's actually all been orchestrated.
[general studio chatter]
[colleague] I don't know
if that's enough...
[Ilse] The execution of our projects
comes down to the tools.
Tangible tools,
such as materials, sketching,
and all the technical tools,
CAD, Vectorworks, etc.
And the ultimate measurable tool,
the tape measure.
A blissfully simple, essential tool.
Dimensions, for us as a studio,
are super important.
When we're making furniture, for example,
three inches is a massive difference
as to whether something is comfortable
or whether it's the right dimension
to have a conversation.
I prefer a table where the dimensions
enhance conversation,
where you're closer together.
What's interesting about tables
is that they can be metaphors
of power and confrontation.
The conference table
is typically wide and long,
and the one at the top
is the one who pulls all the strings.
The informal table, for me,
is a more lovely thing.
The Together Table
is a really good example.
It's actually narrow enough
to have a conversation quite comfortably,
75 centimeters,
and then the oval...
An oval does give you the possibility
to squeeze more people in.
Design that encourages people
to be close together is a good thing.
[general chatter]
I didn't initially see product
as being something
that we either could or should do.
But when we were designing
some interiors,
we needed to do
specific products for those interiors,
because we couldn't find them.
The Brass Cabinet was an original piece
that we did for the Aesop store.
And we evolved the design
for other clients.
To make a good product
is so much more complicated
than just throwing a sketch over a wall
or a CAD drawing to a manufacturer.
Design is a relationship with the maker.
The best results are always
about the collaboration.
You really need to sample it
and refine a product.
It takes many iterations,
so that ultimately it can live on its own.
So for example, when we were designing
the Sinnerlig range for IKEA,
it was very important to us
that we make furniture
that could reach the whole world.
The project for IKEA,
trying to understand
what is mass manufacturing
and instead of maybe saying,
"Oh, this is horrible."
It's questioning
and trying to understand
that mass manufacturing
can give us a great benefit,
because it can give us access
to things for everyone.
[Ilse] For many people, IKEA is a big,
bad cheap furniture warehouse.
But actually, what's really interesting
is strategically what is in that system
that can be used positively,
using design to make things better.
The basis of our relationship was to bring
emotional values into that system
and come out with products
that are sustainable,
but people really love.
What we wanted to do
was not just product development.
We wanted a development of an experience,
and since StudioIlse is working with
both products and interior design,
that's like a perfect fit.
This is actually one year
from when they started, still here.
It's kind of nice.
[Ilse] It's great to see it in the store.
Looking at materials that we could
work with, we came to love cork.
Because it's very abundant,
utterly sustainable, there's no waste.
It goes from being the bark,
harvested in the very old way
with skilled craftsmen who know
how to do it without damaging the trees.
In order to get that tactility,
we had to work very hard
to find a new coating.
Design thrives on restrictions, actually.
I think of it as a primal drive,
that you need those tight restrictions
and then, somehow or other,
you come out of it.
We looked at the process
of making ceramics in Vietnam
and saw that a way of creating
imperfection and difference
was staring us straight in the face,
which is that the jars are dip dyed.
What you got was
there's never one the same.
The process was nearly three years.
People don't realize, I think,
how long it really takes to make something
that comes out at this price
in these quantities.
Bringing together good design
on this scale is just, for us,
a really, really interesting end result.
Now, we're taking the next step,
into the restaurant,
bringing those learnings
into what we could do
to the restaurant business of IKEA...
[Ilse] Yeah.
[Engman] and that's going to be fun.
[Ilse] I grew up in a part of London
that was filled with derelict houses,
which were being smashed down,
but had beautiful 19th-century tiles.
There was no understanding
of the beauty of these things.
My mother and I used to go out at night
with hammer and chisel and rescue them,
so they wouldn't be smashed
by the wrecking ball the next day.
I've always, since a child,
been fascinated by the atmosphere.
And I still am. I think that houses
carry the atmosphere of their past.
Being a designer,
in some way, gives you X-ray eyes
and you're able to see through
the current iteration of a building
and how you can build on that.
Working on Ett Hem was
a four-and-a-half year conversation
because it had quite a tricky time going
through planning and historic permission.
Before collaborating with Ilse,
I had googled her
and understood, you know,
"Wow, she's a rock star." [chuckles]
We spent eight months together.
They really took the time
to get to know me,
showing them, you know, houses
and places I liked here in Scandinavia,
pointing out the important things in life.
Values, food...
the rituals that I care for.
[Ilse] Ett Hem is in a building
built in 1913,
which was a really important time
in Swedish architectural history,
because the home became the focus
for arts and life.
The everyday was something
that was celebrated and delightful.
So one of the core principles
was moving away from opulent luxury
to a notion that luxury is attention.
It's care.
It's actually making the ordinary
extraordinary.
[Mix] Collaborating with Ilse,
first of all, it's complete trust,
you really feel that.
They are very thorough.
[Ilse] Typically, a building process
is a sequence of decisions,
and what are called the "soft decisions"
are made at the end.
If indeed there is any money
left at the end, or time.
But in this case, we wanted
to reverse that process.
We wanted to integrate the experience
of the place with the design
from the very beginning.
To make a place where,
the minute you walked in,
you just felt relaxed
and as though you belonged.
A home.
Ett Hem: a home.
[Mix] When we came up with
the name Ett Hem, it all fell into place.
So regarding the design,
every decision came back to
how does it feel
and how is it run in a normal home?
[Ilse] So we got rid of front
and back of house.
That formality, those boundaries.
Not only do they take up space,
they also make people behave differently.
It's more about the things you do,
rather than the way things look,
and how to create
a proper focus for those.
Those are the moments
that make it all worthwhile.
In Denmark, they call that hygge.
To focus on the moment,
on making the ordinary extraordinary,
making the normal special.
But what happens when we do that
is it makes us
much more open to each other
and much closer.
And it's a really interesting way
of building community.
For example, in the kitchen,
we made it warm and inviting
with a great old table
and we chose the things on the table,
so they really felt memorable, tactile.
Caring about the details,
thinking about how people
will experience the place.
People understand
the care that's gone into that.
Obviously, Ett Hem is a high-end,
relatively small hotel,
but you can do this on a bigger scale.
When you integrate design
into a company like IKEA,
it can have huge effect.
What is so interesting about this project
is IKEA is very much a family store.
You really see big families here,
and it's quite tricky
to take a big family out to eat,
not to mention quite expensive,
so that's a really valuable contribution.
The restaurant hasn't
kept step with the times.
And so they want us to interrogate that.
This is the very area
which we're going to take
-and change it all, hopefully.
-Yeah.
[Engman] We're in one of
the oldest stores now, of IKEA,
and it's the biggest store.
Now we're spread to 375 different stores
in 48 countries around the world.
It was really a new take
on how to serve food
and really good food.
But this is the thing. It doesn't matter
how good we do our baked salmon.
If you meet it in the wrong way,
you get the wrong impression.
[Ilse] Yep, it feels like airport security
at the moment, you really...
-Let's say there is room for improvement.
-Yeah.
[Engman laughs]
[Engman] We serve
640 million people every year.
And this one alone
is something like 3,500, 4,000 a day.
-Yes. Huge.
-They're big numbers, yeah.
[Engman] What we want to do with food
is make people live a healthier
and more sustainable lifestyle
through their food choices.
[Ilse] It makes huge sense,
because if you can change the way
that children feel about food,
that really changes their futures.
[Engman] Yeah, absolutely.
[Ilse] And I think design
really needs to address that.
If you think about
the scale of the project...
I mean, 640 million customers a year
is beyond comprehension in a way.
It's a ten-year plan
and it's only the beginning.
[Peña] They say
that behind every great man
there's always a great woman.
Here, it's the opposite.
Behind a great woman
maybe there's also a very good man.
[Ilse] I was living in New York.
He was living in Milan.
He was working
for the Design Academy Eindhoven,
which I had never heard of.
[Peña] When we were having
a head of department meeting,
I was asked if I knew someone
that they could recommend
for a new design department that was
going to be created called Wellbeing.
I said, "Oh, maybe there's this lady,
Ilse Crawford."
I only knew about her name and her work
from the magazine, Elle Decoration.
She wrote a book, Sensual Home,
and for some reason, I never bought it.
[laughs]
But actually, I married the one
that wrote it, so I didn't have to buy it.
[Ilse] Oscar has been in
industrial product design for decades
and has joined the business.
He's Colombian, so he's brought in
this wonderful character and big heart.
[Peña] This one is the last green touch.
That counts as a vegetable for you,
doesn't it?
I remember, wasn't it
in the 14th century in Turkey the--
Mmm...
It was grounds for a divorce
if a woman's husband
didn't make her coffee.
[Peña] Yeah, I usually get up
and make you coffee.
[Ilse laughs] Exactly.
I think the small moments are
the things you remember in life.
I mean, all of us remember
those connections.
In the design academy,
we are both heads of departments.
I am Department of Man and Activity,
which is more about kind of products,
services, experiences.
Ilse is Department of Wellbeing.
This kind of human engineering
of the emotional side of things.
[bicycle bell rings]
[Ilse] I really do want wellbeing
in the sense of physical
and emotional health
to affect as many people as possible,
which is why I write the books,
why I teach.
I hope that it's contagious.
The whole structure of the school
is based on using people
who are working professionals.
So that's allowed me to combine my love
of working with the next generation
with running my own studio.
When you first approached
the brush makers,
their immediate answer was no--
[student] Yeah, correct.
At the beginning, I think he just thought,
"Okay, he will be gone this afternoon,
and then he will not come back,"
but I came back the second time.
He was very surprised.
That's when I gained his trust.
So the old stick
is the one he made 23 years ago
and I put my new broom on it.
I think that's the conclusion
of our relationship,
how the new one and the old
came together in a broom.
-Relationships can be a bit messy.
-Yeah.
You have to sort of manage through that.
It's really about having
these lively dialogues
with young individuals,
and then giving them the tool kits
to be able to develop their own voice.
The aim is
to enhance the food preparation.
It acts like a magnifying lens,
so you get a different connection
with the food you are preparing.
[Ilse] What I really love about
your project is, when you look at them,
on the one hand, you see kitchen utensils,
and on the other hand,
you look at this material
you've never seen used that way.
[student] Exactly.
It's been a really,
really great trimester.
What I think was probably
quite challenging with the project
was the collaboration and how that
really involves a craft of a relationship.
It's actually a really good microcosm
of what will happen later on in life.
Whether you're working
on a small scale or big scale,
to be a designer focused on wellbeing,
you have to start
with how things are made.
You should feel very proud of yourselves
for the work you've put in this trimester,
so thank you.
[piano music playing]
Being in the school is really being part
of that magical process of creation.
Seeing how things go
from nothing to something.
[piano continues playing]
[Ilse] And actually, now what's happening
in Eindhoven...
A lot of people are now coming
from other cities to go and live there
because you've got
the opportunity to have workshops,
you've got all these different skill sets
coming together,
a sort of mini Berlin.
I think design's got a great future.
[piano continues playing]
Wellbeing is now a philosophy
that's permeating a lot of design.
My fundamental hope, really,
is that everybody starts to think
in terms of putting people first,
and that's really something that
can be done on an individual basis.
[piano continues playing]
I mean, it's a pretty simple mission...
and we do it one space at a time.
One piece of design at a time.
When you prioritize the human needs
within a space,
design can have a profound impact.
[piano continues playing]
I hope that we can add
to the sum of human happiness.
To leave the world a better place.