Bethan Laura Wood’s Fantastical London Home

The British designer Bethan Laura Wooden’s apartment is on the second ground of a 1925 Artwork Deco constructing in East London that has powder pink stairwells, mint inexperienced window frames and infant blue accents. It’s an apt household for an artist whose practice centers on the development of wildly colorful home furniture, lights, homewares and textiles. And as anyone common with Wood’s Wisteria chandelier (a luminous explosion of hand-dyed PVC petals) or her Tremendous Bogus collection of irregularly shaped rugs that riff on the variegated levels of sedimentary rocks could hope, her personal 575-square-foot unit is a stunning ode to the hues and textures that energize her. The partitions are painted in shades of peach, pistachio and mauve, the wooden flooring are covered in lively geometric rugs and just about everywhere are strange objects that Wooden has manufactured or gathered: Pyrex lamps modeled immediately after floral bouquets a side desk produced from Engage in-Doh-like ropes of extruded pastel plastic. “I’ve generally been fascinated by digesting locations through color,” she suggests. “It’s the matter I most use as a language.”

Indeed, Wood’s perform has prolonged explored the psychological efficiency of regional palettes — from the earthy grays of London to the saturated blues of Venice — as very well as the manipulative capacity of industrial resources like laminate that are built to imitate other folks. Incorporating references that assortment from Modernist Mexican architecture to the output of British wooden veneer factories, she creates pieces, typically developed in collaboration with makes this sort of as Hermès and Tory Burch, that achieve into design history and request questions about globalism and authenticity, while also conjuring dreamlike new worlds. For her recent exhibition, “Ornate,” at Milan’s Nilufar Gallery, for example, she drew inspiration from Japanese kimono materials, Victorian boudoirs and the anatomy of bugs, presenting functions this kind of as scalloped aluminum cabinets with slim curving legs, yellow and eco-friendly glass light-weight fixtures that evoke tough candies and an aluminum and brass headboard fashioned from a shimmering profusion of gold and purple squiggles.

Her compact, gentle-loaded living home is no less of a visual feast. Works by other makers that Wood has acquired above the decades — this kind of as the Milan-centered artist and designer Nathalie Du Pasquier’s Royal Daybed (a seven-foot-extended angular chaise made of chunky laminate and exuberantly patterned cotton) and the circular jellyfish-like environmentally friendly, yellow and blue resin lamp by the Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce that hangs above it — play from her individual creations. A woven jacquard tapestry of her structure — emblazoned with teal, rose and burnt orange zigzags and educated by her obsession with the stained-glass windows of the New Basilica of Our Woman of Guadalupe in Mexico Town — addresses the entirety of just one wall a spherical earth-toned laminate eating desk with geology-inspired marquetry stands beside the room’s solitary big window and a totemic light-weight fixture created of stacked beaker-esque forms, manufactured with the Italian glassblower Pietro Viero, hangs from the ceiling.

Collaboration is intrinsic to Wood’s observe, and a lot of of the objects that populate her home are the outcome of partnerships or swaps. From the living area, her collection spills into a slender hallway — the place an array of hats and handbags cling on a number of of Wood’s frilly tonguelike Murano glass hooks and artworks address the walls from flooring to ceiling — ahead of continuing into her bed room, which homes a wavy Ultrafragola mirror by the postmodern Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, a founder of the radical Memphis Group, and a tangled, tubular neon glass mild produced specially for Wooden by her mate the London-centered glass artist Jochen Holz to illuminate a 1970s floral textile that she gained in an trade with a Brazilian gallerist on a journey there in 2014, and which is now pinned higher than Wood’s mattress. Following doorway, in the little, sunny library — which she calls her “room for dreaming” — artwork books sit on cabinets together with animal figurines, glass sculptures, picket busts and other artworks, like a birthday card designed by the Italian designer Martino Gamper, who was Wood’s tutor and mentor at the Royal Higher education of Artwork in London (she received a master’s in product layout from the college in 2009, having examined 3-D layout at the University of Brighton as an undergraduate).

Through the apartment, and in retaining with ideals central to her practice, Wood elegantly juxtaposes substantial design and style with evocative everyday objects, numerous of them uncovered on her travels (a purple-striped broom from a Turkish corner retail store, a magenta and cobalt blue feather duster from China) or at London flea marketplaces, these as her favourite portray, by an not known artist, of a knight bathed in psychedelic swirls. “Don Quixote through the time warp of the ’70s,” is how a good friend set it, says Wood. She frequently positions parts so they can be in conversation with just about every other and she describes how a mask produced of multicolored rope by the Dutch designer Bertjan Pot, which stands not considerably from the portray in the living place, could simply be the knight’s helmet. “I’ll likely do a undertaking all around it at some issue,” she states. Similarly, she enjoys the affinity between a substantial jar of intestine-like balloons submerged in liquid, a work by the London-primarily based Spanish artist Saelia Aparicio, that she retains in her library, and the curving shapes of a poster in her hallway by the Scottish Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, whose motifs Wood routinely references in her individual models.

Gathering and earning have lengthy been entwined for Wood. As a boy or girl expanding up in Shrewsbury, a industry city in central England, she would play consistently with papier-mâché and other craft provides, and her mother’s penchant for accumulating factors like bogus fruit and Bakelite kitchenware affected Wood’s establishing tastes — although her father, who is far more of a minimalist, has constantly most well-liked that all those objects continue being concealed absent (besides at Christmas, when Wood’s mom decorates the home with her collections). “I feel which is why I have to put my objects out, for the reason that my mum is compelled to continue to keep them all in cabinets,” Wooden says with a giggle. “My father finds my flat a bit difficult.”

But for Wooden, the parts she collects are more than decoration they’re a material history of the spots, ordeals and people today that animate her everyday living and perform. “I like the oral historical past that can be embodied in these actual physical matters,” she says, referencing a jewel-toned Uzbek robe she chanced on at a Paris current market and a chair manufactured from polystyrene off-cuts she obtained in an trade with the British designer Max Lamb. Primarily more than the past few of decades, when remaining in has been the default, living amid items sourced from good friends and fellow makers has been not just a pleasure but a balm. “It’s great to expend time with these individuals in real existence,” she claims, “but when they’re not there, I get to expend time with their objects.”