She has also done ceramics, textiles and door handles, and then there’s the growing portfolio of furniture collections. With a seat that looks like an ice cream scoop and four elephantine legs that one half-expects to move at any moment, it doesn’t so much furnish as inhabit the space.Īround the perimeter of this intimate drawing room, slim shelves are piled with archive boxes that contain memorabilia from every project Toogood has worked on, from fantastical installations for clients like Hermès, Kenzo and Commes des Garçons to interi-ors for a crisp Ibizan villa and a moody flat in Mayfair. Plump and tranquil, this six-piece collection of fiberglass furniture includes the low, charcoal-colored chair upon which Toogood is resting. The inner sanctum of the house is on the second floor: a small office that hosts the studio’s daily opera-tions and an adjacent parlor where Toogood spends the majority of her workday, in the company of Roly-Poly. This irreverent mix pro-vides a tactile summary of the burgeoning aesthetic empire that Toogood has forged over the course of the past decade as much as her tangible products, Toogood’s eye and imagination have become her sought-after signatures. Characterful vintage finds (an old wooden pew scored on eBay, a kitchen sink reclaimed from a Dutch canal barge) intermingle with the studio’s own cre-ations, including the elegant Spade chair with its tool-like handle and chubby stoneware pots made for Tokyo’s E&Y showroom. Toogood and her “merry band of misfits” (a 13-person team of recovering architects, liberated industrial designers and art school rescues) spent last fall transforming their new headquarters-which will, as of this spring, occasionally open to the public as a gallery, shop, showroom or workshop-from a state of disrepair into a Gesamtkunstwerk. The House of Toogood, as she has dubbed her studio, sits on a corner of Redchurch Street, a hypergentrified six-block stretch of East London. Toogood’s latest microcosm-a boxy three-story building of modest proportions, with a dusty-black facade and a floor plan that narrows the higher you go-is of the literal variety. I tend to step into whatever world it is that I am making at the time, and I very much inhabit that construct.” “There have been multiple haircuts, multiple wardrobes and multiple versions of me. “I’ve created many identities,” says Toogood, who turned 40 this January. Her hair is now its natural brown, and her expressions are softer. Some five years later, Toogood is sitting in a chair of her own design, on the second floor of her new atelier, a Victorian townhouse in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood, wearing shades of beige: tan, flat-soled boots, sturdy cream trousers and a cream felt coat. She had just collaborated with Opening Ceremony, creating furniture and interiors for the fashion brand’s London pop-up. In an old photo of Faye Toogood from 2012, she is gazing rather sternly into the camera, sporting platinum-blond hair and a leopard-print mini-dress. Toogood’s eclectic new space illustrates her refusal to be defined by a singular kind of output or as a single kind of artist. An Exclusive Tour of Faye Toogood’s New Studio
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