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Jan 5, 2025 | 
worldofinteriors.com | David Lipton
The Gothic, like martinis and Mariah Carey, never needed reviving. ‘Fashion fades, style is eternal,’ said Yves Saint Laurent, who knew a thing or two about the subject. Survival, as academics have argued, is perhaps more apt. Like all the best things, it was handed down rather than requiring full-scale resurrection.
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Jan 4, 2025 | 
worldofinteriors.com | David Lipton
Fresh milk, though sweet at first, curdles fast. In 18th-century ornamental dairies, ladies of the court certainly hoped for the honeyed pleasures of health and female friendship. Some even expected, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu declared in 1740, ‘immortality from the science of butter-making’. Others found their reputations soured. Marie Antoinette, unhappy queen of Louis XVI, lost her crown and then her life because, at least in part, of the perceived extravagance of cream.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
worldofinteriors.com | David Lipton
We are all ‘boats against the current’, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald a century ago. But that idea goes further back still: not for nothing are the vaults of Medieval cathedrals often modelled on ships’ hulls. Artist Frances Carlile has been subtly developing the metaphor with an assembled flotilla of ephemera – leaves, twigs, shells, bones and driftwood – in the forms of tiny vessels.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | David Lipton
There’s no use expecting a fish to climb a tree. So, at least, Albert Einstein is once alleged to have advised. Likewise, when the Parisian Surrealists first arrived in London in 1936 for the movement’s international exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, it may have seemed strange to suppose that those folks would be, in personality as well as output, anything but surreal.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | David Lipton
What’s in the air this month? From jousting vegetables to Sprites and stripes, David Lipton has his finger on the pulse of the latest design developments…No-one knows for sure how the pyramids were built. Nevertheless, their forms have inspired designers and architects from (later) antiquity to IM Pei, with his glass entrance to the Louvre. Likewise, from the 15th century, diamond-pointed pyramid rustication began being used to enliven the surfaces of Italian palazzos.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | David Lipton
What’s in the air this month? From triumphs in tree bark to sumptuous smithery, David Lipton has his finger on the pulse of the latest design developments…The German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann stated that imitating the Greeks was the only way to achieve greatness. Every generation, it seems, must weigh that assertion afresh: regardless of Michelangelo’s tombs or Wedgwood’s vases, designer Sebastian Errazuriz is now testing it again in his latest show, Rebuilding Reason.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | Alice Inggs |Ariadne Fletcher |Alice Kemp-Habib |David Lipton
These emerging designers are ones to watch, handpicked by the WoI team. Take your pick from sinuous glass to vibrant beaded tapestries, or boldly geometric lighting to tableware-with-a-twist. Sanaa Gateja has been dubbed the ‘Bead King’ in Uganda, thanks to his pioneering use of waste paper – transforming books, brochures and all manner of paper waste into beads.
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Sep 20, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Alice Inggs |Ariadne Fletcher |Alice Kemp-Habib |David Lipton
These emerging designers are ones to watch, handpicked by the WoI team. Take your pick from sinuous glass to vibrant beaded tapestries, or boldly geometric lighting to tableware-with-a-twist. Sanaa Gateja has been dubbed the ‘Bead King’ in Uganda, thanks to his pioneering use of waste paper – transforming books, brochures and all manner of paper waste into beads.
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | David Lipton
Across the capital, for London Design Festival 2024, the world's most interesting, innovative and imaginative designers and design brands are putting on a show of decorative excellence. Drawn from the pages of our October 2024 issue, we present the most eagerly awaited projects and events. Abstraction was a reaction against Aestheticism. Art for art’s sake became art for shape’s sake: squares and circles were in, lounging ladies were out. Not that Sophie Taeuber-Arp was ever one of those.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | David Lipton
An electric eel in a pond of catfish was how the writer Edith Sitwell described herself in the book English Eccentrics. She was referencing not just an isolated instance of electric-shock-inducing insanity, but a phenomenon: a group of people who had the leisure, the resources and the inclination to be different; she was just one of many. This is an effect to which England, with its inbuilt class system, is particularly prone.
