As the daughter of artist and interior designer Emma Cooper Key, it is unsurprising that Elsie Abdy Collins has inherited her Mother’s flair for design.
Despite graduating from the Inchbald School of Design just over a year ago, Elsie already has a string of projects under her belt. She co-founded GETmade studio with two fellow Inchbald graduates and they have since collaborated on projects ranging from London’s first triathlon gym to a huge apartment complex in Mexico. Working from home in Notting Hill, Elsie has decided to take the plunge into the world of freelance interior design and tells West London Living about her design philosophy, inspiration, and strange craving for a studio flat.
What got you into interior design in the first place?
My mum’s an artist and she has done up a couple of houses. Most of the houses that I have lived in have been in magazines and I pretty much always lived on a building site. As soon as the house was nice, we would sell it. I’ve always been around it, it’s always been there.
What was the philosophy behind GETmade?
We wanted it to be more creative, if you like a creative platform. A lot of interior designers create places which are, in a way, inaccessible. They are all about aesthetics. They are never about how you move or how you live. We wanted to go back to the basics. Why is all nice dishware so expensive? It’s so ridiculous. We started to design dishware as well [as designing interiors] because it was about everyday life. We collaborated with this artist who designed these amazing drawings and we wanted to come up with dishware that could be sold for relatively cheap but still had style and still looked nice.
What would be your dream project to work on?
I would love to do things that are more temporary in design – like installations. It’s kind of a bit more playful than residential design; I think that’s why I prefer it. You can do things that maybe don’t work so well everyday. I really want to create a festival. It sounds really bonkers but I have been thinking about it a lot recently. Kind of like a dream world with all of these different areas that draw you in where you can have totally different experiences.
What is the most important thing about interior design?
How it makes someone feel. It’s so important to understand how someone’s going to react to a space. At GETmade we had a blackboard covering a whole wall where we literally threw everything on; we also used to have a pinterest board where clients could see everything we were doing. We wanted to create a journey, a blog where clients could log on and see what was happening as the project went along, so there was constant communication. Honesty, that is massively important. We wanted to be so clear. Sometimes people just come from the initial briefing, straight to the finished product and there is not enough communication during the process. I think it is really important because at the end of the day it’s about how the clients going to live in it, about how the person is going to live, how the person is going to eat. The aesthetics aren’t really that important at the end of the day. Obviously you want the best of both worlds.
Which design period do you find yourself most drawn to?
The other day I went to the home of Melissa Chassay who designed the Groucho Club. Her apartment was the most amazing place I have ever seen. It was pretty much all G plan [mass manufactured furniture which was popular between the 1950s and 1980s], it was all really cheap when she bought it and today you can pick it all up in Alfie’s market in Soho. Nothing matched; there was a bright blue leather chair, green leather chairs, these amazing art deco light shades. Her sitting room was amazing; it had a mirror the size of the whole wall, huge ceilings, bright green walls which were painted in the ’80s – like bright, bright green. Completely mental! It was like being transported into another time with their record player and old furniture. It was the most amazing thing ever. So I’m not too sure what style period that is… But that’s the best! ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. EVERYTHING!
If you were decorating your own home, which room would you find the most exciting to design?
That’s a pretty hard one. I really want to live in a studio flat. I don’t know why. I know it’s bizarre but I really want to. Obviously a big studio flat, a nice studio flat; open plan but not in the way that it means now. Not modern or anything. I’d love to have a bed with curtains that separate it from the sitting room. Probably a sitting room, or if I’m rich… A drawing room.
