Bethan Laura Wood’s Fantastical London Residence

The British designer Bethan Laura Wood’s apartment is on the next flooring of a 1925 Artwork Deco setting up in East London that has powder pink stairwells, mint environmentally friendly window frames and baby blue accents. It’s an apt residence for an artist whose follow centers on the development of wildly vibrant home furnishings, lights, homewares and textiles. And as any individual common with Wood’s Wisteria chandelier (a luminous explosion of hand-dyed PVC petals) or her Super Fake series of irregularly formed rugs that riff on the variegated layers of sedimentary rocks may count on, her personal 575-square-foot device is a stunning ode to the hues and textures that energize her. The partitions are painted in shades of peach, pistachio and mauve, the wood flooring are lined in vibrant geometric rugs and everywhere are strange objects that Wooden has manufactured or collected: Pyrex lamps modeled right after floral bouquets a side desk built from Perform-Doh-like ropes of extruded pastel plastic. “I’ve usually been fascinated by digesting spots by means of shade,” she says. “It’s the matter I most use as a language.”

Indeed, Wood’s function has extended explored the emotional potency of regional palettes — from the earthy grays of London to the saturated blues of Venice — as effectively as the manipulative capability of industrial supplies like laminate that are made to imitate other people. Incorporating references that vary from Modernist Mexican architecture to the output of British wood veneer factories, she results in items, normally developed in collaboration with manufacturers such as Hermès and Tory Burch, that attain into layout heritage and talk to concerns about globalism and authenticity, although also conjuring dreamlike new worlds. For her present-day exhibition, “Ornate,” at Milan’s Nilufar Gallery, for example, she drew inspiration from Japanese kimono fabrics, Victorian boudoirs and the anatomy of insects, presenting will work this sort of as scalloped aluminum cupboards with skinny curving legs, yellow and eco-friendly glass gentle fixtures that evoke hard candies and an aluminum and brass headboard shaped from a shimmering profusion of gold and purple squiggles.

Her compact, light-weight-loaded residing space is no fewer of a visual feast. Will work by other makers that Wooden has acquired over the many years — these as the Royal Daybed, a seven-foot-extensive angular chaise made of chunky laminate and exuberantly patterned cotton by the Milan-centered designers Nathalie Du Pasquier and George Sowden, and the circular jellyfish-like green, yellow and blue resin lamp by the Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce that hangs above it — perform towards her very own creations. A woven jacquard tapestry of her design — emblazoned with teal, rose and burnt orange zigzags and knowledgeable by her obsession with the stained-glass home windows of the New Basilica of Our Girl of Guadalupe in Mexico City — addresses the entirety of one wall a round earth-toned laminate eating table with geology-influenced marquetry stands beside the room’s one substantial window and a totemic gentle fixture built of stacked beaker-esque varieties, generated with the Italian glassblower Pietro Viero, hangs from the ceiling.

Collaboration is intrinsic to Wood’s practice, and a lot of of the objects that populate her house are the result of partnerships or swaps. From the dwelling space, her assortment spills into a slim hallway — where by an array of hats and purses hang on numerous of Wood’s frilly tonguelike Murano glass hooks and artworks address the partitions from ground to ceiling — before continuing into her bed room, which properties a wavy Ultrafragola mirror by the postmodern Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, a founder of the radical Memphis Group, and a tangled, tubular neon glass mild designed specially for Wood by her friend the London-primarily based glass artist Jochen Holz to illuminate a 1970s floral textile that she been given in an trade with a Brazilian gallerist on a excursion there in 2014, and which is now pinned over Wood’s mattress. Up coming doorway, in the smaller, sunny library — which she calls her “room for dreaming” — artwork books sit on cabinets together with animal figurines, glass sculptures, wood busts and other artworks, like a birthday card designed by the Italian designer Martino Gamper, who was Wood’s tutor and mentor at the Royal School of Art in London (she acquired a master’s in item design from the faculty in 2009, having studied 3-D design and style at the University of Brighton as an undergraduate).

Through the apartment, and in preserving with ideals central to her apply, Wood elegantly juxtaposes high style with evocative each day objects, several of them discovered on her travels (a purple-striped broom from a Turkish corner keep, a magenta and cobalt blue feather duster from China) or at London flea marketplaces, these as her preferred portray, by an mysterious artist, of a knight bathed in psychedelic swirls. “Don Quixote by the time warp of the ’70s,” is how a pal set it, says Wooden. She frequently positions pieces so they can be in dialogue with every other and she describes how a mask created of multicolored rope by the Dutch designer Bertjan Pot, which stands not significantly from the painting in the living space, could quickly be the knight’s helmet. “I’ll almost certainly do a job close to it at some level,” she claims. Similarly, she enjoys the affinity amongst a huge jar of intestine-like balloons submerged in liquid, a function by the London-dependent Spanish artist Saelia Aparicio, that she keeps in her library, and the curving styles of a poster in her hallway by the Scottish Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, whose motifs Wooden routinely references in her very own types.

Collecting and creating have long been entwined for Wooden. As a baby growing up in Shrewsbury, a industry city in central England, she would perform routinely with papier-mâché and other craft supplies, and her mother’s penchant for accumulating matters like fake fruit and Bakelite kitchenware influenced Wood’s producing tastes — although her father, who is additional of a minimalist, has always chosen that people objects continue being concealed absent (besides at Christmas, when Wood’s mom decorates the dwelling with her collections). “I believe that’s why I have to set my objects out, due to the fact my mum is forced to hold them all in cabinets,” Wooden suggests with a giggle. “My dad finds my flat somewhat tough.”

But for Wooden, the items she collects are more than decoration they’re a materials report of the places, ordeals and people today that animate her lifestyle and get the job done. “I like the oral record that can be embodied in these physical things,” she claims, referencing a jewel-toned Uzbek gown she chanced upon at a Paris sector and a chair made from polystyrene off-cuts she obtained in an exchange with the British designer Max Lamb. Specifically around the past pair of yrs, when remaining in has been the default, living amongst pieces sourced from friends and fellow makers has been not just a enjoyment but a balm. “It’s great to shell out time with these men and women in true lifetime,” she states, “but when they’re not there, I get to devote time with their objects.”