Until last year, Sylvie Macmillan was a successful nail artist, but her background in model making and set design had her yearning for a creative outlet with more permanency than manicures. A personal quest to make a shell-covered candelabra gathered traction with “the fashion girlies” on Instagram, before an Acne Studios commission to make 6ft versions of her marine mosaics turned her fate around. “A lot of shell art is very formulaic,” says 35-year-old Macmillan, whose Brockley home has become something of a seaside grotto enjoyed by her dog Tiny Girl. “I want things to look like they’ve been left in a shipwreck for a long time.” While there’s an earthiness to her treasure (think: mirrors and hairbrushes, as well as lighting), all Macmillan’s mollusks are waste products, never plucked from the shoreline. “I even avoid eating seafood to try and balance out my earth intake,” she adds. Cockle-covered steam rooms and outdoor showers are the end goal, but for now, “candles always feel like a celebration”.
Byron Pritchard, the wood specialist
Byron Pritchard grew up “hanging around” Hackney “needing something different from life”. He found it on Barking College’s product design course. A newfound love of making furniture coincided with Dalston’s coming of age, and soon, Pritchard was the joiner kitting out East London nightlife institutions Birthdays, The Alibi and Visions “basically for no money, just the love of it”. Now, his exotic wood-filled E8 studio is the place to go for one-off commissions that leave the design process open-ended. “Ideas become apparent along the way,” says the 44-year-old creative, who veers away from contemporary resources he regards as “vision clouding”, in favour of his stack of vintage craft magazines. “Most of us want something personal – even if we don’t know it.”
Tessa Silva likes rhapsodising about a deadstock fabric warehouse “the size of a football pitch” in Walthamstow, where she sources waste materials for her Smock series: sculptural, topsy-turvy stools, floor lamps and chairs created by smocking silk, cashmere, cotton and taffeta. For the 36-year-old, Tulse Hill-based artist and furniture designer, who has produced pieces for Max Radford Gallery and Axel Arigato, the joy of her process comes by way of never knowing what materials she’ll find (a tip for those living further West: head to Goldhawk Road for textile inspiration). Silva’s interest in “the seductive power of fabric” developed from a project on her product design masters at The Royal College of Art in 2016, where she created a plastic from raw milk: “I sewed moulds from a stretchy fabric, allowing the material to bulge and swell.” On her next sourcing trip, her eyes are peeled for leather off-cuts. “I design almost like dressing a mannequin. Fabric defines the form.”
“People think I’m the wood guy, but I try not to be definable,” smiles the 37-year-old Hackney-based artist and designer Rio Kobayashi, whose playful work ranges from chairs made from XL Mikado sticks to shelves resembling tongue-wagging heads and a dining table in the shape of a tuna. Kobayashi attributes his “ambiguous” approach to a feeling of intangible identity, having grown up in the remote Japanese countryside near the pottery town of Mashiko, before moving to Austria in his teens. The trained cabinet maker – who uses salvaged materials to hone his humorous designs – has just finished a dining set for a Kate MacGarry Gallery pop-up exhibition in Rye, featuring a glass-topped table made from repurposed chairs, resembling “the skeleton of an animal”; a mezzanine broadcasting room that “looks a woodworked tram” for Future Days Shop in Amsterdam; and the second iteration of , a three-year group show at Ginza Six retail complex in Tokyo, focused on the continued reinterpretation of Yoshino cedarwood. “My language brings together the old and new,” he says.
