MILAN — Adding fresh new pages to their deeply rooted histories, heritage home brands are increasingly recruiting artists and fashion designers from unexpected places to amp up their cool factor.
Monday, U.K.-based furnishings-to-home accessories company The Conran Shop, which was founded by Habitat creator Sir Terence Conran in 1973, turned to the carefree, cartoonish aesthetic of British pop-artist Philip Colbert and artist and filmmaker Charlotte Colbert to launch a vibrant limited-edition product range and pop-up at The Conran Shop Sloane Square; Storied Venetian fabric maker Rubelli, which Queen Margherita of Savoy commissioned to create chiseled silk velvet in 1902, recently found its groove with U.K. based artist English artist and designer Luke Edward Hall, known for his playful hand-drawn sketches; Svenskt Tenn, the Swedish design brand started a century ago in Stockholm and has also worked with Hall, made a splash last year with a picnic-inspired collection with Margherita Maccapani Missoni.
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The Importance of Storytelling
Bringing in a shot of cool gives heritage companies a fresh way to tell their stories in the modern era — and the designs often allow brands a chance to bring in new customers. Annalisa Rosso, cofounder of Milan-based consulting firm Mr. Lawrence, said the dialogue that results from the collaborations is just as important as the designs.
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“It is more than ever strategically crucial for companies to find a dialogue between heritage, tradition and new languages that is not just a ‘celebration of the masters of the 20th century,’ but with the aim of generating a new path: projected toward the future, looking to the past and not vice versa,” Rosso said.
For The Conran Shop, which unveiled the Colberts’ vision of “Modern Surrealism” and introduced designs like the Love Bed and Eye-conic Eye chair by Charlotte, and Lobster chair by Philip, into their flagship, relevance remains a main factor when choosing new design collaborators. So are the potential brand synergies and the opportunity to create something unique that elevates the store space, adds variety to the product offering and of course, infuses fun into The Conran Shop world.
Charlotte Colbert said that the main aim in the duo’s immersive takeover of The Conran Shop’s Sloane Square store was to inject a dose of fresh energy. She helped create a whimsical world with a series of “doodle furniture” based on pencil-like drawings that became sculptures and objects, such as heart benches and snake-shaped tables.
“I did a surreal take on the bedroom, with sky- and cloud-covered walls and floor, to host my fantasy Love bed. I like to think of beds as portals into other worlds, a path to our universal unconscious within which we perhaps all meet and wander,” Colbert said.
Luke Edward Hall, Heritage Brand Cool Kid
Known for balancing painting, drawing, writing, interior design, knitwear design and home decor, Luke Edward Hall is a go-to collaborator for brands looking to spice things up. He caught the design world’s attention in 2019 when he interpreted Neptune’s Journey for Ginori 1735, a fabled brand that reportedly counted Napoleon I’s wife Marie Louise of Austria among its fans.
In 2022, Hall designed a collection of textiles titled “Return to Arcadia” for storied Venetian fabrics maker Rubelli and in April, the firm unleashed the first collection of wallpapers created for Rubelli by Luke Edward Hall. Named “Parade,” the collection is composed of designs inspired by ancient Greece and Rome that were originally hand-sketched with Hall’s elegant yet cartoonish flair. In recent years, Rubelli has been working on incorporating contemporary style into its orbit and attracting new generational consumers. It even tapped an entire design studio, Formafantasma, as creative director last September as part of that mission.
Hall’s contemporary style is rooted in antique appreciation, which allows his brand work to serve as an evolution rather than a “clash,” said Rubelli’s chief executive officer Nicolò Favaretto Rubelli. That fusion is allowing Rubelli to usher in an era of “fun,” he added.
“I always enjoy taking inspiration from the past (old books, art history) but I want to make work that feels alive and of the moment. I try to achieve this through my use of color and drawing style, which is bold and quite graphic. I also love mixing things up. One minute I might be looking at ancient Egypt, the next it could be 1980s pop music movements. I hope that this magpie approach gives my work its own special character,” Hall told WWD in an interview.
“Rubelli is a global company, distributed worldwide. Our clients differ in culture, age and needs and we wish to offer to each of them something interesting and suitable for their wishes, thus developing products that can fulfil may different needs,” Favaretto Rubelli said.
Svenskt Tenn
Svenskt Tenn (Swedish for Swedish Pewter), which was founded initially as a small pewter producer by Estrid Ericson in 1924, is also channeling fun — see its collaboration with Maccapani Missoni last year. She designed a small range of special-edition Svenskt Tenn products including heart-shaped cushions using Austrian designer Josef Frank’s patterns Mirakel and Barranquilla. Like Hall, Maccapani Missoni is a history buff.
“She’s also a big fan of Svenskt Tenn and Josef Frank’s design for a very long time. She has a lot of furniture and prints in her own home, but she made sort of a tribute as well to Estrid Ericson because Ericson was a very talented sort of curator, and she was very good at doing creative table settings,” Svenskt Tenn CEO Maria Veerasamy told WWD.
Paris-based data research and insights company Launchmetrics said that the collaboration continues to perform well. During the month of April (between April 4 and 30) Maccapani together with Svenskt Tenn garnered $190,000 in media impact value.
A Collab Hot Spot Emerges
Quirky collabs came to fruition in time for Design Week in Milan earlier this year. Fashion designer Arthur Arbesser unveiled his first designs for Austrian heritage furniture maker Wittman, which was founded as a saddlery in 1896. Also a fan of patterns by Austrian architect and artist Josef Frank, Arbesser paid homage to Frank’s work with his own “Flower” print that was fashioned with a telephone hiding within the petals to represent the reality of modern life.
British designer Faye Toogood also infused her unconventional style into Poltrona Frau’s iconic Vanity Fair armchairs. The result was the Squash collection (an armchair, mirrors, rugs, side table and footrest), which she said is like “English folk with Italian horsepower and embodies her soft, sculptural approach.”
When Toogood first visited the Tolentino, Italy-based firm known for traditional models like the Chester, she immersed herself in the archives and studied the leather interiors the firm produces for carmaker Ferrari.
“At Poltrona Frau, we are constantly on the hunt for creatives that can understand our heritage but envision it today; I always like to say that tradition needs to evolve, and we enjoy joining forces with talents from all around the world we admire and can offer an unexpected interpretation of our world,” Poltrona Frau CEO Nicola Coropulis said.
Targeting New Demographics
Heritage design firms are more ready than ever to embrace pop culture to attract new consumers, experts said. The Conran Shop is a prime example.
“We always ask ourselves whether we believe the collaboration in case will appeal to our customers, whilst at the same time being open to exploring how a partnership could introduce us to a new audience or demographic that we might not necessarily have engaged with previously,” The Conran Shop’s head of creative Mark Upstone told WWD.
Cofounder Francesco Mainardi of Mr. Lawrence agreed, adding that the criteria for quality design is also evolving.
“In our industry, the values attached to a brand and its products are no longer linked only to the quality of materials, but increasingly also to how it is made and through which processes (including creative ones). It is in this field that knowing how to trigger virtuous dialogues between heritage, design and innovation today means “good design.”