Table Top: Snowden Flood
We are lucky enough to be invited into the home of designer Snowden Flood, who recently collaborated with us during the London Design Festival by upholstering our Reuben and Emilia chairs in her striking new range of textiles. The gorgeous Emilia chair, covered in Snowden’s new Rae velvet was on display at Decorex. Here she shows us her eclectic coffee table, stacked high with books, travel souvenirs, herbal tea and other creative objects designed to inspire.
My table top is invariably covered in books. I’m the daughter of a librarian/book dealer and always have a stack on the go. Vying for space amongst the books are the things I’m working on and inspired by. I also love to collect so there may well be some of whatever is my passion of the moment. Lastly, there are bound to be some family related items – maybe something my son has made, or a board game we’ve been playing.
Five random facts that inform my work (and also my table top):
- Much of what I do has hinged around my love of stories. I think that being the child of immigrants & growing up surrounded by objects, memories, images and tales about a ‘golden’ and magical ‘other’ life, objects became imbued with incredible meaning and narrative.
- I have a lot of energy and like to have lots of projects on the go otherwise I get bored. So I’m just as happy designing wrappers to go on some soaps I’ve developed as I am making up a new recipe or building a deck in my garden.
- I trained as an artist and sculptor, and I love to draw, paint, collage and make linocuts at home.
- I worked as a Textile Specialist for an architect and interior designer in New York. Textiles are a big passion of mine.
- I adore Art Deco.
In my stack of books are two that I return to again and again. The first of which is Daniel Miller's – The Comfort of Things. He goes into the interiors of everyone on an ordinary London street. The houses are all outwardly the same, but the interiors are very different and reflect the psychologies of their inhabitants. I find their attitudes to their possessions and how they use their spaces fascinating. It Chooses You by Miranda July is great too – she spends a summer procrastinating so instead of working on a screenplay, she answers advertisements in the classifieds. Travelling around LA talking to the sellers of various things, from rabbits to a leather jacket. The people she meets are so random and have great stories – I love this book! More than half of any book pile of mine will usually contain images I’ve been feasting on. I love Wiener Werkstatte designs and often look at a book I bought from eBay (it has a library sticker on it, so maybe the seller stole it … I hope not!).
I drink copious amounts of green and herbal tea, always in a bone china cup because the tea tastes nicer! This one is my Thames River cup and saucer – the source of the river starts on the plate and meanders down to London and out to the sea across the cup. When my parents moved to London in the sixties, we lived opposite Battersea Power Station on the river, and now I work from a studio/shop in the Oxo Tower, which faces the Thames. I love the Thames and often return to it in products I design – in pursuit of the perfect souvenir!
When I lived in NY, I started to collect travel souvenirs. I have lots of little plates, but my collection of NY postcards from the twenties to forties is something that I like to look at and imagine how amazing it was when all the skyscrapers were being built.
I have just launched a collection of textile designs and have been cutting lots of samples to send out to interior designers - so right now every table in my house has various little piles of patterned linen and velvet.
