If you’d expect anyone to spend their days working amidst a snowdrift’s worth of process and ephemera, it’s London designers Doshi Levien. What you see piled atop the shelves and pinned to the walls of the couple’s Shoreditch studio, after all, is the product of two very different yet equally prolific minds working through their own approaches to the same tasks — Nipa Doshi being the Bombay-born lover of handicraft who collages, paints, and draws her way towards ideas from the ground up, and her Scottish husband Jonathan Levien, who spent his childhood in his parents’ toy factory and developed the more exacting methods of an industrial designer, prototyping proclivities and all. While both enjoy surrounding themselves with collected objects like Italian ice cream cups and Chinese pencil boxes, it’s impossible to understate the importance of the couple’s divergent interests to their work’s unique point of view; the designs that made them famous, after all, were daybeds and sofas for Moroso that combined industrially produced furnishings with hand-embroidery and textiles sourced from Indian artisans. It would be a cliché way of characterizing the pair if it weren’t so overwhelmingly true, even by their own admission: “After ten years of working together, I see it as an essential ingredient in what we do, almost a layer in the approach without which it would feel naked,” says Levien.
The day this past March that Sight Unseen visited the duo’s surprisingly sunlit studio, Doshi was poring over some colorful exploratory sketches for a forthcoming Camper store themed around boardwalks and the proverbial endless summer, while Levien stood over her shoulder offering suggestions for how to refine the focus and execution. Besides those rare times when one of them designs something the other thinks is perfect enough to leave be, they almost always collaborate on projects, to varying degrees. “What happens is that an idea will start from someone, but it’s not until the other person comes on board that it really becomes whole,” says Levien. “There are some projects where it’s easy to see who’s having a stronger influence — Principessa for Moroso was more of a Nipa project, whereas the Kali range is more into my territory — but there’s still always a balance.” By Kali he means the line of covetable plastic bathroom accessories put into production earlier this year with the German housewares company Authentics, and by balance he refers to those subtle moments when he and Doshi’s perspectives suddenly and crucially synch up. “I think it’s really important that even objects like these have that sense that you want them,” Doshi says of the line’s soap dishes and toothbrush holders, comparing their appeal to that of jewelry. “It’s really about creating objects and not products,” Levien chimes in.
There are a few other objectives on which the pair agrees, even as their interests are still, even now, diverging (Levien has his mind set on doing more industrial production pieces, while Doshi is yearning to dip back into experimental work like the pair’s Wellcome Trust window installation from 2004). They’ve been thinking about putting together a book, and even more ambitious, opening a curated retail store. They’d use it as a space to expand their design activities, offering not only their existing products and editions, some of which can’t be found elsewhere, but also pieces they haven’t been able to justify making without such an outlet — new textile collaborations with Indian craftspeople, for example, that would be too expensive to produce and difficult to sell with a middleman involved. “It will inspire us to create a lot more work,” says Doshi. “It’s not just about selling things, though, but about linking those things to cultural insights, and being able to present our idea of how the world should be.” To learn more about their vision in the meantime, check out our peek into Doshi Levien’s studio at right.
You can learn a lot about Dutch designer Bernadette Deddens by just looking at her. First there are the shoes, which — depending on the day and the whims of London’s weather — she very well may have made herself. One pair of sandals constructed from $25 worth of pale leather and black cording could be mistaken for Margielas, yet are no less awe-inspiring for the fact that Deddens actually nicked the look from Tommy Hilfiger. After all, who makes their own shoes, anyway? Then there’s her jewelry, which is almost always her design, unless it’s a collaboration with her husband Tetsuo Mukai, with whom she formed Study O Portable two years ago. The jewelry is their way of giving people a form of creative expression that can be carried outside the house and into the wider world, as Deddens so poignantly demonstrates — hence their otherwise peculiar studio name.
The story of Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings began, like many Dutch stories do, in a church. In the late ’90s, Baijings was working for an agency whose headquarters were located inside one of the country’s many abandoned houses of worship. Scholten, a graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, had a burgeoning design practice nearby. Scholten was asked to design a small bar for the agency’s office, and “the rest is history,” says Baijings.
If there’s one thing that’s defined a Rich, Brilliant, Willing product since the studio’s three members graduated from RISD in 2007 and banded together to make furniture, it’s the idea of the mash-up. In most of their pieces, seemingly disparate materials and odd colors come together in a sort of joyful schizophrenia — a lamp with differently colored, awkwardly placed dowel legs, a wood-and-metal coat rack with copper, steel, and plastic pegs, and even a candle holder crowded with tapers, birthday candles, and fat, number-shaped votives. But a funny thing happened this spring: The trio released a series of cast-glass pendant lights with the Los Angeles–based design company Artecnica that were notable not only for their pretty, industrial aesthetic but for their adherence to a single, monochromatic material. “It’s unusual for any object to made of a single part these days,” says Theo Richardson, who with Charles Brill and Alex Williams makes up the trio, their surnames forming the basis for the studio's cheeky name. “Most of the time, things are glued together, screwed together. But for us, this was going from assemblage work to something that’s made of a single piece.”