Faye Toogood, a furniture and interiors designer and stylist out of London, has a laundry list of accomplished projects under her belt. Her resume includes design work for crazy-big names like Comme des Garcons and Alexander McQueen. Yet as impressive as that sounds, we can’t help but believe that Toogood’s home has to be her most spectacular achievement of all!
Recently featured in T Magazine, her London flat bridges modern and antique in perfect juxtaposition, making for an incredibly ethereal, airy and collected work of artful design. We’re excited to kick off the 2014 version of our Designer Files series with a space that is just too good to handle! Ha- get it?!
Inside Toogood’s home light dances around the moody blue walls and shadows play against the washed out floors creating the perfect backdrop for her collection of antiques. I love how they never once seem overpowering or cluttered, right? In fact, these old pieces feel incredibly modern in her space and have found their place through what Toogood describes as much “trial and error.”
Toogod readily admits that her styling work is really a matter of arranging and rearranging. When she buys a new piece, what does she do? Rearranges again of course- a girl after our own heart, I’d say! {You can watch a fun time lapsed video of her figuring out a “final” styled look for her mantle here!}
One of our favorite elements in the home is the fluid use of blue. The color blends into the rest of the neutral palette, practically becoming a neutral itself! Despite its calming effect, Toogood has come up with an intriguing recipe of making the hue exciting by varying the shades of the color in each room. The teal painted wardrobe in the bedroom instantly brings an icy lake to mind and the deep blue in the bathroom shocks the senses, leaving no room for lack-of-color lethargy!
Despite our love for the blue, we’re dying {in a good way!} over the simplicity and modernity of the neutral kitchen. Oversized Mutto knobs, normally used to hang clothing and accessories, are reinvented as statement making hardware on Toogood’s Ikea cabinets and with an Ikea hack that good, the kitchen easily takes the cake as our favorite room in the home!
There’s no way we were going to leave looking over these images without feeling inspired by their beauty! The calming grays, creams, whites and blues, the mix of natural and hard edges, the modern and the new all had us dreaming up ways to achieve a similar look:
get the look: 1 // 2 // 3 // 4 // 5 // 6 // 7 // 8
First, you must start with those amazing Mutto knobs. Whether you choose to use them as cabinet pulls or not isn’t the point. They’re so impactful on their own and can just as easily make an artsy statement in an entry way or closet, housing your purse or necklaces. Second, the shapes, color and texture of Toogood’s ceramics play a big part in achieving that flea market meets fine china style so we say, stock up on pottery. And last but not least, have fun with different shades of blue from navy-black all the way to a muted grey. You’ll never tire of layering in more blue for that perfectly collected English vibe!
What do you think? A pretty unbelievable house tour, right? You can see Toogood’s entire interview, home, designs and video here.
images via T Magazine // photography by Henry Bourne
