Making Waves: Faye Toogood

Faye Toogood, the London-based interiors stylist who has spent the past decade creating sets for Wallpaper and The World of Interiors magazines, as well as shop interiors for Tom Dixon and Dover Street Market, has made the leap into furniture design with her first collection, Assemblage 1. Made in Britain and crafted primarily from three native materials—sycamore, brass, and Portland stone—the line alludes to Toogood’s childhood in the English countryside, yet it looks at home in even the most urban interiors. “I didn’t want the collection to be too country,” she says. “I like the glamour and luxury of the city. I wanted it to be Wellies and lipstick as opposed to Birkenstocks and dirty hair.” A side chair, which combines a three-legged milking stool and the handle of a gardening spade, has brass metalwork snaking down its legs like stitching on the back of a seamed stocking; a wooden armoire with slatted tambours is modeled after corrugated-iron grain silos; and, in a nod to her ornithologist father, Toogood, 34, customized leather binocular bags with tiny mirrors and gold pigskin pockets. Her favorite, Element (above)—a coffee table composed of a glass top on a brass tube, a sycamore sphere, and a stone cube—is part 1960s play set, part Suprematist art, at once new and eternal. Next up: Assemblage 2, which she describes as a “darker, tougher” reinterpretation of the objects from her first collection, had its debut at the just-wrapped Salone Internazionale del Mobile (studiotoogood.com).

Photo courtesy of the designers