It was the great surrealist Salvador Dalí who was once quoted as saying, ‘I am not strange. I am just not normal.’
It’s a sentiment that could as easily be applied to the new home of artists Philip and Charlotte Colbert in London’s Spitalfields. The couple’s hugely successful contemporary take on surrealism – a little bit pop, a smidgeon romantic – informs all of this property’s design, with their recognisable motifs visible at every turn.
Philip’s love of lobsters sees them populate not just his real-world work but also Lobsteropolis, his own uncanny corner of the metaverse, while Charlotte, a film-maker as well as an artist, finds herself returning to the symbolism of eyes and powerful, feminist depictions of the uterus.
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There are few other places where you would find both a giant crustacean-shaped headboard and a bathtub adorned with 108 hand-cast silicon breasts.
The aim, says Philip, was ‘to take art out of the frame, off the plinth and into everyday life’. The couple’s reference points are artists who similarly strove to break down boundaries – from Dalí, who was as fond of creating a sofa and a telephone (lobster-shaped, of course) as he was of painting, to Sonia Delaunay, a 1920s artist who translated her abstract designs onto everything from clothing to a car.
More than decorating a home, the creation of ‘Maison Colbert’ was about realising a world within the confines of one very special building. For this, there were few better people to collaborate with than interior designers Angus and Charlotte Buchanan, founders of Buchanan Studio. With a background in set design, Angus has conjured up magical concepts for the fashion and theatrical worlds, so he understood exactly the attention to detail (and little black book full of skilled craftspeople) a project like this would require.
‘Philip and Charlotte are no strangers to having things made, or that process, but this was on a huge scale,’ Angus tells us. ‘We engraved their motifs into cutlery, hand-painted them onto crockery and produced unique pieces of furniture.
Philip has his lobster cap and clothes; he lives, sleeps and breathes his art, but now he can live in it, sleep on it…’
It is, in fact, Angus’s love of small but magical decorative touches that led to the idea for the Wes Anderson-inspired concierge desk, which stands at the entrance of this home. He was working on its themed bedrooms – each of which, as well as a bespoke upholstered headboard, also has a custom-made stained-glass light by its door and a unique key – and realised there needed to be a place to stash all of those keys. A simple hook by the door would not suffice!
The candy-striped desk (which handily doubles as a bar) is a flight of fancy, yes, but those imaginative detours are a large part of Maison Colbert’s charm. This is a place where the lines between art and design are deliciously blurry, where practical items like furniture, tableware and lighting have ambitions beyond the functional.
As Angus puts it: ‘A chair has to support you, it has to be a chair, but why can’t it also be a work of art?’ Why not indeed? buchanan.studio
