Cult Store: handmade furnishings with pioneer spirit

Born to a carpenter and a quilt maker in rural Oregon, Tyler Hays learnt the worth of constructing issues along with his palms from a younger age. “I had a stitching machine once I was 5 years previous, welded a go-kart once I was 9, and my brother and I might rebuild engines and make cannons,” he remembers. “As I grew up I developed an obsession with texture, element, building and engineering.” 

He channelled this obsession into BDDW, the furnishings and design studio he began in New York in 1994. Purchasers of this multidisciplinary visionary now embody presidents, rock stars and Hollywood royalty (though good luck attempting to prise any names from him).

Hays’ newest BDDW outpost opened on London’s Mount Road final yr, and his meticulous consideration to element is seen from the second you step inside the doorway. Look carefully, and also you’ll see that every oval tile is painted with pale blue birds, flowers, leaves and tiny faces, a mode impressed by American salt-glazed crocks. The Nineteenth-century salt-glazed and hand-printed stoneware pottery was one thing his mom as soon as collected. “I need individuals who stroll in to really feel that all the things’s a little smooth,” he says. “Not previous, not new.”

This sensibility is felt all through the store. Partitions are completed in a “household recipe” of brushed plaster and parquet flooring are common from blackened oak. The fireside has been lined with extra handpainted tiles. “You may by no means do any of those methods with a machine,” he says.

I need folks to really feel that all the things is somewhat smooth

Playfulness runs via the designs on show. A big papier-mâché lamp painted with folk-art flowers, hanging from a ceramic chain, is known as the “Grandma crappy craft pendant” (£15,000). An acrylic and oil portray of swimmers is certainly one of a number of photos lower into unfastened puzzle items (£28,000). His (now iconic) ping-pong desk is made in maple with a holly inlay, and with a internet from perforated leather-based (£26,500). Individually painted stoneware mugs embody the raunchy XXX assortment (from £290). And a turntable designed to play three data in succession nods to Hays’ love of jazz and bluegrass, which he likes to play whereas working within the studio. 

That every merchandise within the BDDW universe is made by hand is central to Hays’ perception in craftsmanship and timelessness. The whole lot is designed by Hays earlier than being delivered to life in a posh of craft studios in Philadelphia, the place round 100 ceramicists, carpenters, stonecutters and garment-makers work. 

These conventional strategies have been “not at all trendy once I was rising up in the hyper-sleek design world of the ’80s”, says Hays, however, partly due to him, have since grow to be so. Now his “weenie” roasts and archery contests, held in upstate New York, convey collectively his neighborhood and are attended by a cohort of style designers, musicians and artists.

His subsequent ambition is to begin his personal resort, “someplace that actually represents who I’m and what I like”, he says. “I usually joke that I might like to be the concierge in a resort the place all the things was designed by me, and I may carry folks’s luggage in and get to observe everybody take pleasure in my work.” 

5 Mount Road, London W1K 3NE; bddw.com; @bddw_etc