If the ground floor of Deyan Sudjic’s north London house looks a little bare – all white walls, stripped floors, high ceilings and a slick, steel-counter-topped kitchen – it serves all the better to display the furniture. This is, in its way, exactly the house you might expect the former director of London’s Design Museum to have: a perfect backdrop for a collection, in this case, of remarkable chairs, in a neighbourhood with gentility and grime within easy reach.
These exhibits, though, are not on pedestals but in everyday use: a set of Hans Wegner dining chairs, a Gerrit Rietveld Red and Blue armchair that still looks ridiculously modern despite its design being more than a century old, and a pair of vintage Alvar Aalto plywood stools placed side by side beneath the tall kitchen window.
If anything jars in the elegant early-Victorian house it is not the modernist furniture but rather an elaborate stone fireplace, clearly an import from France and looking a little arrogant in this very British interior. “Before we bought it,” says Sudjic, 72, sitting across an enormous dining table that is as big as a bedroom, “this house belonged to Jasper Conran and John Galliano. They had their studio on the top floor. It was remodelled by [British architect] Nigel Coates, but unfortunately the people they sold it to had it completely remodelled. The fireplace is one of the few things that survives from that earlier period.”
Its latest incarnation was designed “with a bit of advice from John Pawson”, Sudjic says. It shows. Particularly in the floor, the boards of which seem unusually wide. “Some of them go all the way, back to front,” he says. “We had to get a crane to get them in.” We head upstairs. “There’s too much furniture,” Sudjic admits, a little sheepishly. It’s not exactly rammed, but the airy (white) drawing room does look a little like a designer beauty parade. There’s an Eames lounger and ottoman right where you’d expect it. There’s an unusual Harry Bertoia chair clad in purple velvet, a Jasper Morrison sofa, a Le Corbusier chair, a Marcel Breuer coffee table and Dieter Rams’s unavoidable and possibly unimprovable shelves for Vitsoe, neatly stuffed with books.
It’s a relief almost to find a lovely-looking old wooden sunbed and a pair of dining chairs that came from the home of Sudjic’s father-in-law, the architect John Miller. Sudjic’s wife, Sarah Miller, the founding editor of the UK’s Condé Nast Traveller magazine who now runs a brand consultancy (she is away on an exotic photoshoot when I visit), is from an architectural dynasty: her stepmother was Su Rogers, one-time wife of Richard Rogers who once had a practice with him. “Sarah is trying to implement a policy of one book in, one book out,” Sudjic says. “It’s not working that well.”
Sudjic himself (his parents emigrated to the UK from the former Yugoslavia) began by training as an architect, though quickly gravitated towards media. He was a co-founder of Blueprint magazine in 1983, a big-format, lush and self-consciously cool mag that brought the disparate tentacles of London’s then-buzzing design scene together to suggest more coherence than there probably ever was. When I ask him where he now thinks design is going, four decades after he founded Blueprint, he says, not necessarily helpfully, “I’m always a little wary of the word ‘design’, as if it were a thing. It isn’t, it’s a method.”
Maybe. But the home of the co-founder of the UK’s former leading design magazine and former director of the Design Museum certainly does seem to have a lot of design in it. I ask whether he thinks there might be too many chairs in the world? He adopts a slightly pained expression. “As Jasper Morrison said, we don’t need to design a new chair just to refine an existing one.”
Sudjic is finishing a book on the furniture manufacturer Vitra. The company has the licences to make some of the best-known and best-loved modernist designs, from Charles and Ray Eames to Jean Prouvé and Hella Jongerius, and an impressive museum in Germany. Now, under the leadership of CEO Nora Fehlbaum, it is making a radical shift towards sustainability. “Its former CEO, [Nora’s uncle] Rolf Fehlbaum, is a very unusual businessman. He has a PhD in utopian industrial settlements and what he’s built in Weil am Rhein, with buildings by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Álvaro Siza and others is like a contemporary version of something by Tomáš Baťa or Robert Owen. He made a kind of architectural collage that maybe no one else could have done.”
Vitra is a remarkable company. But it is joined in the design ecosystem by hundreds of other outfits churning out fast-fashion furniture, infinite chairs, sofas and unpleasant coffee tables. Is there not too much production in design now? Even Vitra itself admits its Eames loungers are CO2 intensive. “What makes [Vitra] different,” Sudjic insists, “is that it’s designed to last 50 years. If you were to have, today, a 1950s fridge, or a car, they’d both look quite eccentric. By comparison with all the other objects designed in 1956, I think this chair [he nods towards the lounger] has lasted pretty well. ”
As we look around, more and more chairs begin to trigger anecdotes, from a fantastically lightweight Cassina Superleggera by Gio Ponti (which he was given as a former editor of the Italian Domus magazine) to a chunky Ron Arad design made from an old Rover car seat that looks rare. Is he a collector? “Oh no, I’m far too disorganised to be a real collector,” he says. “Perhaps more of an accumulator.”
All those chairs might have fitted more easily into one of his former homes. “When we started Blueprint, I lived in a Wapping loft big enough to cycle around. It was a bit like living on the set of The Long Good Friday. The river had such a presence then but it was very quiet.” He continues: “In those days I believed an architecture editor should put his money where his mouth is, so I commissioned John McAslan to design a living pod in the middle of the loft.” His first flat was designed by the Czech émigré architect Jan Kaplický. “It was an indoor spaceship.” Anyone who has seen Kaplický’s media stand at London’s Lord’s cricket ground will know exactly what he means.
Towards the top of the house, lurking in a hallway is yet another remarkable-looking chair, a bit of a miniature throne with its upholstery replaced by gleaming slats of brass. “That one was designed by Rei Kawakubo,” he says. “She gave it to me when I wrote a book about her.” Paul Smith introduced him to the Comme des Garçons designer on a trip to Japan. “I went to visit textile mills with her, and went to the Paris showing of her collections, where John Malkovich and Julian Sands were models. At the same time I was looking at an Issey Miyake store designed by Shiro Kuramata, and the dividing line between design, fashion and architecture began to dissolve.” He still gets his suits from Paul Smith’s bespoke operation (“it’s a very fine thing, a bespoke suit”).
No longer leading the Design Museum, for which he commissioned John Pawson to reimagine the wonderful midcentury Commonwealth Institute as its new Kensington home, you might think Sudjic was slowing down. But he is writing books, has his Vitra volume coming soon, edits an annual design magazine, Anima, and is a professor of architecture and design at Lancaster University. And he regularly dips his toes into newspaper journalism, which he still clearly loves. “Really, it’s a licence for curiosity, isn’t it?” I agree, as I nose around his bookshelves one last time.
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