ELLE Decoration

5 days ago | elledecoration.co.uk | Phoebe Frangoul

It’s easy to see how it happens – you go out fully intending to buy a sofa, and come home with an interior designer instead. That’s what happened to this apartment’s owner, an entrepreneur and collector who originally came to Christophe Delcourt to design her some furniture. ‘Then, one day, she commissioned us to work on her apartment,’ he recalls.

1 week ago | elledecoration.co.uk | Phoebe Frangoul

I believe this 19th-century church pew comes from the West Midlands, where I have my family home. It’s one of a pair (purchased on Vinterior) that I keep in my London warehouse apartment, where I both live and work part-time. It’s a way of life I think I inherited from my father, a stained-glass artist and restorer – as a child, seeing his workshop bolted onto our family home ingrained in me this way of working. A reverence for the maker’s hand is present within the pews.

1 week ago | elledecoration.co.uk | Clare Sartin

‘As long as a tree takes to grow, should be at least as long as you use a product,’ says Torben Hansen, the Danish carpenter who, in 1984, founded a regenerable wooden flooring and surfaces brand in Bavaria. ‘Our products should last forever – they are companions for a lifetime and the next generation.’His company, Schotten & Hansen, leads the way in innovation when it comes to timber.

1 week ago | elledecoration.co.uk | Clare Sartin

Open shelving 2.0 Recently, a rise in the demand for purpose-built pantries and a renewed love of Welsh dressers and other pieces of kitchen furniture once thought a tad traditional might have suggested that our tastes are changing when it comes to storage. There were whispers that our collective obsession with open shelving was waning – perhaps it was an inevitable consequence of all that dusting required to keep glassware and crockery clean?

1 week ago | elledecoration.co.uk | Phoebe Frangoul

There are certain perks, says Pierre Frey, communications director of the firm whose name he shares, to living ‘above the shop’. The grandson of the French fabric house’s founder moved into the apartment on the top floor of the headquarters, in a magical triangle between the Opéra Garnier, the Palais Royal and the Louvre, as a student. When he eventually joined the family business, ‘I was working day and night; it was very convenient,’ he says.