[Ilse] Some people think interior design is a look.
In fact, "It must be really fun buying furniture"
is something one person said to me once.
But I see it differently.
We spend 87% of our lives inside buildings.
How they are designed really affects how we feel, how we behave.
Design is not just a visual thing.
It's a thought process.
It's a skill.
Ultimately, design is a tool to enhance our humanity.
It's a frame for life.
[lively piano music playing]
[gentle studio chatter]
[colleague] It's still got a really strong design quality.
I just added a note. That's a stone floor...
[Ilse] All our projects start with a strategy.
Basically prioritizing people,
putting the human experience at the beginning of the design process.
Each of these chairs has met many of these criteria.
I think we should narrow it down to two.
Michael, what are the pluses and minuses of this chair?
[Michael] The materials are great. We really like it.
-It's got real tactile memory, actually. -Yeah, and it's quite easy to handle.
[Ilse] In our process, we interrogate the place, the client,
and then empathize...
because empathy is a cornerstone of design.
[Michael] It's great. The form.
[Ilse] Yeah, it's a good chair.
-Quite a challenge, isn't it? -[colleague] Yeah.
[Ilse] You want to feel easy and relaxed,
so I think it does come down to these two.
And then from that process of interrogation and empathy,
that's when the imaginative process kicks in.
Interiors, which for ages have been treated
as being a slightly sillier side to design,
is now beginning to be taken seriously.
[TV reporter] Glancing at the artistic lines of this modern home,
we forget the old idea that houses should follow past and out-of-date fashions.
Traditionally, interior design has been a predominantly visual medium,
it's been rather frothy and flamboyant.
It's all about showmanship and theatricality.
Ilse's approach is much more subtle, it's much more sensual.
It's about how things feel and smell as much as how things look.
She wants to imbue people with a sense of wellbeing, empowerment
and sort of gentle joyfulness.
By many people, Ilse's seen as something of an icon... [chuckles]
because she has developed a whole new way of looking at interiors.
One of the qualities that distinguishes her work
from that of other interior designers
is that it's about how we experience a room
and how we ourselves feel in a room
to satisfy the subconscious.
Ilse's strength is her humanity and her caring.
She really cares about wellbeing.
Everything that surrounds us is really done with this care,
with this love that makes you kind of feel good.
And not just look good, too.
[Ilse] I am a very self-motivated person.
I actually had always worked.
I mean, literally, I started working on the side when I was 13
because I've never wanted to ask for money.
I've always wanted to be independent.
I worked at Pitts Cottage as a waitress, I'm sure completely illegally,
serving coffees and shortbread biscuits which had a cherry in the middle
and looked like a breast. [chuckles]
I remember it so clearly.
From a kid, I was interested in how people behave differently in different spaces.
That fascinated me.
So when I went to university, I studied history and history of architecture.
After university, I was the studio manager for an architect,
and from there, was hired to work on the editorial team
of an architect's magazine, because I knew my stuff.
So when I was asked to start Elle Deco, it was a no-brainer
because I really wanted to do a contemporary magazine
that was warmer and reached a bigger audience.
[Rawsthorn] Ilse has always treated interior design,
both as a designer and magazine editor originally,
with a seriousness and a complexity that was arguably lacking before.
[Ilse] Editing a magazine is really about having
a very close connection to your audience
and knowing how to reach them, how to excite them, how to inspire them.
It's a conversation, essentially, that you have with your reader.
We presented these livable spaces.
The journey of the scene, 4,000, 5,000 different interiors,
seeing how people really use space.
Which spaces really worked, which spaces really touched our audience.
I mean, that was really my design education.
But I wanted to do my own thing, I wanted to make things,
I wanted to get my hands dirty and really do something for myself.
I'm driven by my curiosities.
By learning more about what made people comfortable in space,
researching in Anthropology, Behavioral Science and so on,
that really made me understand how we discover the world.
I wrote a book called Sensual Home.
In that book, I went through the senses because it seemed to me fascinating.
That is, after all, how we experience the world.
We are our bodies.
Writing Sensual Home was the aha moment,
because it wasn't the current understanding of design.
So I knew that my days as a two-dimensional person were over
and I really wanted to move into three
and figure out whether I could work in that field.
[piano music playing]
My first project was immediately after I left Elle Decoration,
when Nick Jones from Soho House asked me to help him with Babington House.
His first hotel out in the countryside.
I had no practical experience at that point,
so it was pretty adventurous of him to ask me.
Nick started on a path of it being rather traditional.
It's in the country, so it was going to be a country house hotel.
I was very clear that that was the last thing it should be.
It was for the media and advertising and film crowd,
so my proposal said it should be this very informal place
that you could just treat as if it was your own.
Like a family house of a friend
where the parents have gone away for the weekend
and left the keys to the drinks cabinet.
And now, that doesn't seem so radical,
but really then, it was the first of a kind.
And then Nick asked me to do the next Soho House in New York.
And that's really where the studio began
because that's when I brought people in to help me,
and it grew from there.
And it has been one project after another since then.
Cecconi's was an old, failing Italian restaurant
in the center of London.
We looked at making it
something that had the character of the grand Italian station bar.
Those wonderful, democratic, beautiful spaces,
that was very much like a stage for the staff that work there.
And an interior made with materials all from the region around Venice.
High Road House, Chiswick, was about making this great public space downstairs,
and then rooms that reflected the simplicity
of the arts and crafts houses that were all around it.
We did The Olde Bell,
a really quite smelly pub when we first saw it.
We were asked to define what an English coaching inn would be,
translating that into furniture,
materials,
food,
uniforms.
We also worked with Mathias Dahlgren in Stockholm
to develop two restaurants
which would be the physical manifestation
of his love and philosophy of Swedish gastronomy.
We did the first Aesop in the UK.
The owner said the thing about skin care that made the difference
was not just what was in the product,
but the ritual of daily maintenance.
So we put the sink in the middle of the store.
The notion of taking care of yourself elevated through design.
What we're really interested in is translating the client,
the future life of a building,
into a design language.
So quite a range.
What was really exciting was to figure out if our approach worked
for very different people in very different places.
We managed to create these special identities.
I mean, people said that, while they didn't look the same,
they did have a similar feeling.
By creating places that really affect people through five senses,
they had a real connection that was very unusual at the time.
While I know what works for me visually,
I need to make sense of it through writing
in order to then do what I do.
I need both hands to speak to each other.
So the second book was trying to figure out
how to structure my design thoughts into actually a design manifesto.
[Thompson] Ilse makes things easy to comprehend
'cause she's broken them down into very basic ideas.
Twenty-plus years ago, Ilse had very new ideas,
and I think it takes a long time for a new idea to really become an established idea,
and so it's been a process.
[Ilse] I grew up in a pretty progressive family.
Both my parents were extremely free thinking.
My mother was a trained artist
and my father was an investigative journalist for The Sunday Times
and an economist.
My father was very demanding academically. I learnt how to prove myself very young.
Because he was of the mind that humans don't question or interrogate reality
before they have an opinion.
If you interrogate a situation,
actually, the answers present themselves to you.
And my mother was adventurous.
She gave us total freedom really, with our own environment
to express ourselves.
But when I was a teenager, my mother got quite sick.
She was in her mid-30s.
I spent quite a lot of time going in and out of hospitals to hang out with her.
Those great long corridors reduced people to patients,
waiting for the doctor in the white coat to march up and down.
They were really inhuman.
To see that a building could have such an impact on the way people felt,
on the way they interacted.
It was a real revelation that human values are non-negotiable.
That combination of interrogation and empathy
is something that's been with me from the very beginning.
When we first approach a project, we always hold off what our opinion is.
So we ask questions. We watch a lot.
We listen.
I always say to my team we've got two eyes, two ears and one mouth
and we should use them in that proportion.
[general project chatter]
[Ilse] Through that process of interrogation and empathy,
we can understand really what it is we're looking at.
Our expertise in terms of process
was relevant when it came to working on a project like with IKEA.
They noticed the humanity of our approach,
and that's something that is embedded in their ideology as a company.
They're very interested in how we can bring those human values
into their restaurants.
This has to be a very robust vision
because it's going to be translated round the world.
[colleague] It's a huge thing.
The restaurant is always done as an afterthought.
The store is the mammoth thing to get right.
Yeah.
And, like we talk about, the end of the system,
that's the bit that gets the last bits of the money
and the last bits of the time.
So it would be quite interesting to reverse that process.
I didn't know it was called a restaurant. I just thought that's really interesting.
-[Ilse] It's a cafeteria. -[colleague] Yeah.
They can use that space to encourage and give sort of behavioral cues to people
to eat more healthily, especially kids.
Although it sounds like the hot dog is something that will be hung on to.
Maybe that's okay.
It just needs to be sort of framed in a different language, not advertised...
[Ilse] But apparently the veggie ball is doing brilliantly.
[colleague] Is it really? That's great.
[colleague] The next steps will be to go and do
some very rigorous observation in IKEA
in the existing environments.
[Ilse] Changes on this scale could make a massive impact.
Almost every client finds this room their favorite space.
Each project has its specific material language that we might use
in terms of how they're laid, how they're finished.
Materials are the thing that tell the truth.
It's something that we go into in great detail.
Humans naturally are drawn to materials.
We discover the world through our senses.
What we're interested in is how materials speak to us.
The things that touch the skin, the things that really give you memory.
We focus a lot on that.
Materials are much more compelling and convincing
once you see them in context,
or at least in the character of light that will hit it,
and ideally in association with the other materials that will be with it.
Really, it's that combination of materials that speak to each other
and create this tactile, warm and very physical environment.
So for example, when we were working on Cathay Pacific Airport lounges,
you really need to choose materials that are functional, but yet luxurious.
Now, these are people who are tired, who are probably jet-lagged,
and a lounge is a place to make them feel human.
Typically, an airport lounge will often line chairs up rather institutionally,
and we didn't want to do that.
We wanted it to have the sense of domestic space, but yet function well.
That was a challenge.
The lounge needed to have minimal maintenance,
to be somewhere that could withstand many, many people per day
going through with wheelie suitcases which bash the walls.
So paint, for example, was a no go.
It needed to be materialized in a way that expressed Cathay
and not, for example, another airline.
So when it came to choosing materials for the first-class lounge,
in the hallway, we chose onyx.
It's a natural material, it's from the area, it's an Asian material
and because it's robust.
It's not the cheapest material you could find,
so we needed to balance it with something more down-to-earth that offset it.
So we chose a limestone.
But then we needed to add warmth.
We actually understand materials best by contrast.
Our senses are wired in such a way
that we understand that rough feels rougher by contrast with smooth.
To get the best out of these materials, we needed to find its opposite.
So mohair velvet, which is a very robust velvet,
which is totally durable but feels luxurious.
So offsetting the hardness,
the coolness of the onyx and the limestone.
Then bringing in something natural, both in finish and also form.
And then to bring in the touch of lux, it had a brass base.
So it was less about the aesthetics or the appearance,
although that's obviously in the mix,
but much more about how to make an environment
that made people feel better after they'd been there than when they arrived.
It's all about wellbeing.
That means that when people walk into it,
they don't know why they feel the way they feel,
but it's actually all been orchestrated.
[general studio chatter]
[colleague] I don't know if that's enough...
[Ilse] The execution of our projects comes down to the tools.
Tangible tools, such as materials, sketching,
and all the technical tools, CAD, Vectorworks, etc.
And the ultimate measurable tool, the tape measure.
A blissfully simple, essential tool.
Dimensions, for us as a studio, are super important.
When we're making furniture, for example,
three inches is a massive difference as to whether something is comfortable
or whether it's the right dimension to have a conversation.
I prefer a table where the dimensions enhance conversation,
where you're closer together.
What's interesting about tables
is that they can be metaphors of power and confrontation.
The conference table is typically wide and long,
and the one at the top is the one who pulls all the strings.
The informal table, for me, is a more lovely thing.
The Together Table is a really good example.
It's actually narrow enough to have a conversation quite comfortably,
75 centimeters,
and then the oval...
An oval does give you the possibility to squeeze more people in.
Design that encourages people to be close together is a good thing.
[general chatter]
I didn't initially see product
as being something that we either could or should do.
But when we were designing some interiors,
we needed to do specific products for those interiors,
because we couldn't find them.
The Brass Cabinet was an original piece that we did for the Aesop store.
And we evolved the design for other clients.
To make a good product is so much more complicated
than just throwing a sketch over a wall
or a CAD drawing to a manufacturer.
Design is a relationship with the maker.
The best results are always about the collaboration.
You really need to sample it and refine a product.
It takes many iterations, so that ultimately it can live on its own.
So for example, when we were designing the Sinnerlig range for IKEA,
it was very important to us
that we make furniture that could reach the whole world.
The project for IKEA,
trying to understand what is mass manufacturing
and instead of maybe saying, "Oh, this is horrible."
It's questioning and trying to understand
that mass manufacturing can give us a great benefit,
because it can give us access to things for everyone.
[Ilse] For many people, IKEA is a big, bad cheap furniture warehouse.
But actually, what's really interesting
is strategically what is in that system that can be used positively,
using design to make things better.
The basis of our relationship was to bring emotional values into that system
and come out with products that are sustainable,
but people really love.
What we wanted to do was not just product development.
We wanted a development of an experience,
and since StudioIlse is working with both products and interior design,
that's like a perfect fit.
This is actually one year from when they started, still here.
It's kind of nice.
[Ilse] It's great to see it in the store.
Looking at materials that we could work with, we came to love cork.
Because it's very abundant, utterly sustainable, there's no waste.
It goes from being the bark, harvested in the very old way
with skilled craftsmen who know how to do it without damaging the trees.
In order to get that tactility,
we had to work very hard to find a new coating.
Design thrives on restrictions, actually.
I think of it as a primal drive, that you need those tight restrictions
and then, somehow or other, you come out of it.
We looked at the process of making ceramics in Vietnam
and saw that a way of creating imperfection and difference
was staring us straight in the face,
which is that the jars are dip dyed.
What you got was there's never one the same.
The process was nearly three years.
People don't realize, I think, how long it really takes to make something
that comes out at this price in these quantities.
Bringing together good design on this scale is just, for us,
a really, really interesting end result.
Now, we're taking the next step, into the restaurant,
bringing those learnings into what we could do
to the restaurant business of IKEA...
[Ilse] Yeah.
[Engman] and that's going to be fun.
[Ilse] I grew up in a part of London that was filled with derelict houses,
which were being smashed down, but had beautiful 19th-century tiles.
There was no understanding of the beauty of these things.
My mother and I used to go out at night with hammer and chisel and rescue them,
so they wouldn't be smashed by the wrecking ball the next day.
I've always, since a child, been fascinated by the atmosphere.
And I still am. I think that houses carry the atmosphere of their past.
Being a designer, in some way, gives you X-ray eyes
and you're able to see through the current iteration of a building
and how you can build on that.
Working on Ett Hem was a four-and-a-half year conversation
because it had quite a tricky time going through planning and historic permission.
Before collaborating with Ilse, I had googled her
and understood, you know, "Wow, she's a rock star." [chuckles]
We spent eight months together.
They really took the time to get to know me,
showing them, you know, houses and places I liked here in Scandinavia,
pointing out the important things in life.
Values, food...
the rituals that I care for.
[Ilse] Ett Hem is in a building built in 1913,
which was a really important time in Swedish architectural history,
because the home became the focus for arts and life.
The everyday was something that was celebrated and delightful.
So one of the core principles was moving away from opulent luxury
to a notion that luxury is attention. It's care.
It's actually making the ordinary extraordinary.
[Mix] Collaborating with Ilse,
first of all, it's complete trust, you really feel that.
They are very thorough.
[Ilse] Typically, a building process is a sequence of decisions,
and what are called the "soft decisions" are made at the end.
If indeed there is any money left at the end, or time.
But in this case, we wanted to reverse that process.
We wanted to integrate the experience of the place with the design
from the very beginning.
To make a place where, the minute you walked in,
you just felt relaxed and as though you belonged.
A home.
Ett Hem: a home.
[Mix] When we came up with the name Ett Hem, it all fell into place.
So regarding the design,
every decision came back to how does it feel
and how is it run in a normal home?
[Ilse] So we got rid of front and back of house.
That formality, those boundaries.
Not only do they take up space, they also make people behave differently.
It's more about the things you do, rather than the way things look,
and how to create a proper focus for those.
Those are the moments that make it all worthwhile.
In Denmark, they call that hygge.
To focus on the moment,
on making the ordinary extraordinary, making the normal special.
But what happens when we do that
is it makes us much more open to each other
and much closer.
And it's a really interesting way of building community.
For example, in the kitchen,
we made it warm and inviting with a great old table
and we chose the things on the table, so they really felt memorable, tactile.
Caring about the details,
thinking about how people will experience the place.
People understand the care that's gone into that.
Obviously, Ett Hem is a high-end, relatively small hotel,
but you can do this on a bigger scale.
When you integrate design into a company like IKEA,
it can have huge effect.
What is so interesting about this project is IKEA is very much a family store.
You really see big families here,
and it's quite tricky to take a big family out to eat,
not to mention quite expensive, so that's a really valuable contribution.
The restaurant hasn't kept step with the times.
And so they want us to interrogate that.
This is the very area which we're going to take
-and change it all, hopefully. -Yeah.
[Engman] We're in one of the oldest stores now, of IKEA,
and it's the biggest store.
Now we're spread to 375 different stores in 48 countries around the world.
It was really a new take on how to serve food
and really good food.
But this is the thing. It doesn't matter how good we do our baked salmon.
If you meet it in the wrong way, you get the wrong impression.
[Ilse] Yep, it feels like airport security at the moment, you really...
-Let's say there is room for improvement. -Yeah.
[Engman laughs]
[Engman] We serve 640 million people every year.
And this one alone is something like 3,500, 4,000 a day.
-Yes. Huge. -They're big numbers, yeah.
[Engman] What we want to do with food
is make people live a healthier and more sustainable lifestyle
through their food choices.
[Ilse] It makes huge sense,
because if you can change the way that children feel about food,
that really changes their futures.
[Engman] Yeah, absolutely.
[Ilse] And I think design really needs to address that.
If you think about the scale of the project...
I mean, 640 million customers a year is beyond comprehension in a way.
It's a ten-year plan and it's only the beginning.
[Peña] They say that behind every great man
there's always a great woman.
Here, it's the opposite.
Behind a great woman maybe there's also a very good man.
[Ilse] I was living in New York. He was living in Milan.
He was working for the Design Academy Eindhoven,
which I had never heard of.
[Peña] When we were having a head of department meeting,
I was asked if I knew someone that they could recommend
for a new design department that was going to be created called Wellbeing.
I said, "Oh, maybe there's this lady, Ilse Crawford."
I only knew about her name and her work from the magazine, Elle Decoration.
She wrote a book, Sensual Home, and for some reason, I never bought it.
[laughs]
But actually, I married the one that wrote it, so I didn't have to buy it.
[Ilse] Oscar has been in industrial product design for decades
and has joined the business.
He's Colombian, so he's brought in this wonderful character and big heart.
[Peña] This one is the last green touch.
That counts as a vegetable for you, doesn't it?
I remember, wasn't it in the 14th century in Turkey the--
Mmm...
It was grounds for a divorce
if a woman's husband didn't make her coffee.
[Peña] Yeah, I usually get up and make you coffee.
[Ilse laughs] Exactly.
I think the small moments are the things you remember in life.
I mean, all of us remember those connections.
In the design academy, we are both heads of departments.
I am Department of Man and Activity,
which is more about kind of products, services, experiences.
Ilse is Department of Wellbeing.
This kind of human engineering of the emotional side of things.
[bicycle bell rings]
[Ilse] I really do want wellbeing
in the sense of physical and emotional health
to affect as many people as possible,
which is why I write the books, why I teach.
I hope that it's contagious.
The whole structure of the school
is based on using people who are working professionals.
So that's allowed me to combine my love of working with the next generation
with running my own studio.
When you first approached the brush makers,
their immediate answer was no--
[student] Yeah, correct. At the beginning, I think he just thought,
"Okay, he will be gone this afternoon, and then he will not come back,"
but I came back the second time.
He was very surprised. That's when I gained his trust.
So the old stick is the one he made 23 years ago
and I put my new broom on it.
I think that's the conclusion of our relationship,
how the new one and the old came together in a broom.
-Relationships can be a bit messy. -Yeah.
You have to sort of manage through that.
It's really about having these lively dialogues
with young individuals,
and then giving them the tool kits to be able to develop their own voice.
The aim is to enhance the food preparation.
It acts like a magnifying lens,
so you get a different connection with the food you are preparing.
[Ilse] What I really love about your project is, when you look at them,
on the one hand, you see kitchen utensils,
and on the other hand, you look at this material
you've never seen used that way.
[student] Exactly.
It's been a really, really great trimester.
What I think was probably quite challenging with the project
was the collaboration and how that really involves a craft of a relationship.
It's actually a really good microcosm of what will happen later on in life.
Whether you're working on a small scale or big scale,
to be a designer focused on wellbeing,
you have to start with how things are made.
You should feel very proud of yourselves for the work you've put in this trimester,
so thank you.
[piano music playing]
Being in the school is really being part of that magical process of creation.
Seeing how things go from nothing to something.
[piano continues playing]
[Ilse] And actually, now what's happening in Eindhoven...
A lot of people are now coming from other cities to go and live there
because you've got the opportunity to have workshops,
you've got all these different skill sets coming together,
a sort of mini Berlin.
I think design's got a great future.
[piano continues playing]
Wellbeing is now a philosophy that's permeating a lot of design.
My fundamental hope, really,
is that everybody starts to think in terms of putting people first,
and that's really something that can be done on an individual basis.
[piano continues playing]
I mean, it's a pretty simple mission...
and we do it one space at a time.
One piece of design at a time.
When you prioritize the human needs within a space,
design can have a profound impact.
[piano continues playing]
I hope that we can add to the sum of human happiness.
To leave the world a better place.