Some interior designers don’t simply dare to be different. They turn mutiny into an art form. Just as living with rebellious design isn’t for everyone, nor is creating it. Challenging the status quo takes guts as well as skill, and not all designers are natural rule-breakers.
But for those who thrive on provoking a reaction, sparking a conversation and dividing opinion, there is freedom to be found in the rejection of convention. From placing pattern and colour in bold, clashing proximity to installing a cantilevered tabletop to the point of near physical impossibility, these five designers feel that going against the grain is all in a day’s work.
The curator
Giant cast-resin ants scaling the walls? A ceiling of candy cane stripes? If it’s bold, out-there rebellion you want, Studio Vero is the design practice for the job. Founders Venetia Rudebeck and Romanos Brihi are known for creating high-impact spaces that embrace colour and reflect the sometimes eccentric personalities of their client base. They agree that rebellious design isn’t about trying to shock for the sake of it — rather, it’s about having the courage of one’s design convictions.
‘The most interesting homes are the ones that ignore the unwritten rules,’ says Rudebeck. ‘You need to have the confidence to trust an idea, particularly when it reflects the people who live in the home.’ Take the set of huge resin ants she recently deployed, part of a collection by Colombian artist Rafael Gomezbarros: they could easily be defined as rebellious but don’t seem out of place given the homeowners’ overarching love of art. ‘We aren’t interested in playing it safe,’ says Rudebeck. ‘And the ants make people smile and become a talking point. We love design that makes people look twice.’
The risqué maximalist
Lisa Burdus’s commitment to rebellious design is staunch and, sometimes, just a little bit raunch. So much so, in fact, that when she posted an image of her downstairs loo on Instagram, it was deemed ‘inappropriate’ and promptly removed. Why? Because she’d covered the ceiling in a rather risqué wallpaper: Le Couple, by Pierre Frey, displaying a pair of lovers in a series of amorous clinches.
It fits in neatly with Burdus’s wider philosophy that design should be daring, unbridled and, above all, playful. ‘Why not have some fun with interiors?’ says the designer and bespoke fabric distributor, who splits her time between Australia and the Cotswolds. ‘I loved that wallpaper. It’s quirky and, when used in the right setting like a downstairs loo, can create lots of laughs and conversations.’ If in doubt, she says, there is no harm in pushing boundaries, embracing your inner rebel and ‘surprising your guests with a little fun on the ceiling’.
The provocateur
Mumbai designer Rooshad Shroff’s particular brand of rebellion pushes the boundaries of physics to their limits. Consider his coffee tables with massive cantilevers. ‘When you see five-foot-long overhangs supported on a tiny pebble or stacked blocks of onyx on top of each other in a precarious form, it appears that these things are in a state of unrest,’ says the architect, a veteran of OMA and Zaha Hadid Architects. The idea is to make the pieces appear unstable or delicate when they are, conversely, stable and functional.
With his mind-bending approach to design, Shroff specialises in optical illusion designed to bamboozle. ‘When a piece of furniture feels as if it is in a state of flux or captures movement or motion,’ he says, ‘it holds a very different provocation. The idea is to gently nudge someone, by design, to pause for a second and really consider their environment.’ Breaking the rules does also mean breaking things in a literal sense, he says. His famous etched marble lightbulbs, the epitome of audacious rebellion, saw 40 broken prototypes before the first emerged unscathed.
The problem-solver
For architect Fiona Naylor of Clerkenwell-based design practice Johnson Naylor, rebellion means building where others fear to tread. Take Dungeness, a desert-like sweep of shingle on the Kent coast where Naylor has worked on a swathe of properties. Thanks to tight planning regulations and dramatic meteorological extremes, this place of untamed natural beauty is nearly impossible to build on. Yet Naylor has spent three decades converting industrial buildings on the estate into homes. These include the Coastguard Lookout, the Pump Station, the Experimental Station and Radar, a former research base.
The architecture responds to its surroundings with a focus on defence and shelter rather than ornament and embellishment. ‘A lot of people come here and don’t realise just how dramatic the weather can be,’ she says. ‘There have been storms here that have completely remodelled the beach and have lifted thick stone slabs and flipped them across the deck. We have had water coming through the walls only to discover it was being physically pushed through saturated brickwork by the pressure of high winds.’
The recycler
When no factory would take on Caroline Olah’s furniture designs, she did what any decent rebel would do and opened her own. Frustrated after years failing to source genuinely sustainable corporate furniture, the interior designer set up Reddie and created a mid-century-inspired collection of versatile, sustainable furniture using waste materials like reclaimed timber, recycled plastic and discarded metal. Later, she ran into a bigger issue when she couldn’t find a manufacturer for her designs. ‘Traditional factories aren’t built for reclaimed materials as they’re too irregular and unpredictable for robotic machines to mass-produce with,’ she says.
At her purpose-built factory in Java, Indonesia, she can manage the entire supply chain. Owning its own production means the business can produce less for more, and work more intentionally on a broader range of bespoke orders.
