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If you’re passionate about interior design, mark your calendar for Decorex 2024, taking place from October 6-9 at Olympia Events in London. For 46 years, Decorex has been the UK’s premier event for discovering the latest trends and products in high-end interior design. This year promises to be more exciting […]
As the global epicenter of creativity and design, London is set to host some of the most anticipated interior design events of 2024. This year, the city’s vibrant design community will converge on four major events that promise to redefine the boundaries of interior aesthetics: the Cruise Ship Interiors Expo, […]
Modern living rooms have become synonymous with the perfect fusion of style and comfort in London’s bustling metropolis. These contemporary spaces exude sophistication while providing a haven of tranquility in the midst of urban chaos as a hub of relaxation and entertainment. In this article, we’ll look at what makes […]
An Irish born, extremely talented interior designer with an architectural education – David Collins. Best recognised for his luxury restaurant and bar interiors that can be found all over London and in many places abroad.
His sudden death in 2013 moved deeply fashion and design world everywhere. His work is continued now by the Collins Studio – interior design and decoration practice he established in 1985 in London.
See also: CONTEMPORARY FAMILY HOME BY DAVID COLLINS STUDIO
Born in 1995 and raised in Dublin, Ireland, David Collins’s childhood ambitions might have denied the world some of the most treasured interiors of the 20th and 21st centuries. Fortuitously, his family put pay to fashion designer and musician aspirations while an aversion to Latin prevented a career in law. Instead, David followed in his father’s footsteps with a degree at Bolton Street School of Architecture.
From Dublin, he travelled to Europe, settling in London where, in 1985, Serendipity would have him redecorate a friend’s home, a design that was later seen by Pierre Koffmann who enlisted David to design La Tante Claire. These projects were the foundations of the earliest iteration of David Collins studio; at that time, a modest practise specialising in small interior architectural jobs. Chance decisions and opportunities had led David to the point where he would determinedly begin to delineate his innovative creative vision.
From those early beginnings, David and his business partner Iain Watson set out to bring a new form of thinking to the design industry. The vision was clear: projects that are a sophisticated counterpoint between aesthetics and rationale. Inspired by the approach of 20th century modernist titans like Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, David and Iain envisaged a studio that employed a team covering all elements of interior and architectural practice. This multidisciplinary team facilitated a multifaceted approach ensuring an initial concept could be developed, detailed and successfully delivered through to the final stages, thereby adhering to van der Rohe’s adage that “god is in the details”.
Over the course of the next twenty-eight years, David assiduously gathered around him designers of diverse disciplines. Under his inspired guidance, the team have realised projects that redefine how we live in public and private. David’s legacy is a subtle vision that pervades the contemporary aesthetic.
Each David Collins studio project across hotels, restaurants, residential and retail, is a deeply textured interior that feels simultaneously contemporary and established, rooted in the life and traditions of its location and exemplifying the studio’s extraordinary capacity to reinvent and reinterpret the past.
David Collins died in 2013. Being a truly gifted and inspirational man has left us with some of the most remarkable and treasured interiors. David Collins Studio still exists in London. In his honour studio have made a donation to MacMillan cancer support whose incredible team cannot be underestimated.
See also: TOP LONDON INTERIOR DESIGNER JULIETTE BYRNE
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Source: Best Interior Designers Blog
