‘Below Stairs’ Is Somewhere You’ll Want To Be During London Design Festival

Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby, Jasper Morrison, Martino Gamper and Paul Cocksedge to exhibit ‘Below Stairs’ at Sir John Soane’s Museum during London Design Festival

Leading UK designers Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby, Jasper Morrison, Martino Gamper and Paul Cocksedge have created new and bespoke work for a group show curated by Rachael Barraclough, which informs how we design for our lives today. Alongside these pieces will be a sensory installation from artist and food historian Tasha Marks.

Below Stairs (13 September 2016 to 28 January 2017) is running in partnership with this year’s London Design Festival, and will take place in Sir John Soane’s Museum’s newly reinstated Regency kitchens. The exhibition is part of the opening of new spaces at the Museum, following the completion of the seven-year restoration programme entitled Opening Up the Soane.

Curators Rachael Barraclough with assistant curator Zoë Wilkinson has invited five designers, each with a longstanding passion for the culinary and the domestic object, to respond to the previously unseen kitchens of the Georgian house museum. The exhibition’s title, Below Stairs refers to the life of Sir John Soane’s staff and servants in the basement of the house. The kitchens were the domestic heart of the Regency home – a place where elaborate meals were prepared, laundry washed, and provisions for the household ordered and received. The museum’s programme of restoration was initiated in order to bring ‘lost’ spaces of the house back to how they would have been in Sir John Soane’s day. The kitchens – which have never been open to the public before – retain their original flagstone floors, iron cooking ranges and built-in dressers.

The designers were invited to consider their work in relation to the domestic spaces of the museum.

Visiting the kitchens whilst renovation works were taking place, they were able to engage with the original walls and features, which had been hidden for so many years. Each was inspired by the spaces in different ways.

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby who have designed ranges of tableware, day-to-day objects and a number of dining tables, were interested in the central role of the kitchen table. In response they have created a special edition of their Tobi-Ishi table for B&B Italia in timo green with a gloss finish, using 50 layers of lacquer. Also displayed is their Port Black vase for Venini, which has been specially made in black glass.

Jasper Morrison’s fondness for an honest aesthetic provides a perfect fit for the museum’s utilitarian kitchens, which align with Morrison’s vision for functional pared down objects. Studying the Museum’s details with interest, he wanted to see all of the original domestic objects that would have been in daily use in the kitchen. He has created a contemplative installation in Soane’s newly opened Kitchens by placing antique glassware pieces from his own personal collection into the limited edition Object Frame.

Jasper Morrison commented: The fact that the Object Frame serves to store and display these items, reduces its presence and the effect it has on the atmosphere to a minimum, whilst displaying the pieces it enhances the atmosphere of the old kitchen by adding objects which would originally have been present, but which have for some time been stored elsewhere.

This project reflects a number of themes that are key to the designer’s work: the subtle insertion of contemporary objects (the frame) into a historical setting (as seen at his exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Bordeaux in 2009); highlighting the design qualities of everyday objects, as seen at his concurrent exhibition The Hard Life at his Shop in Shoreditch and his interest in the life of the kitchen, a sector in which the designer has been very active and has collaborated with a number of different brands.

Part-chef and part-designer, Martino Gamper’s London/Milan food pop-ups are indicative of his love of cooking and affinity with the kitchen. Fascinated by Sir John Soane’s eclectic display of objects and use of materials, he has incorporated some of the materials found in the house into a series of vases (Duotone, Off-Cut Lino and Vasenamel), which are displayed in the new kitchen spaces.

Paul Cocksedge studied the amber-coloured glass that Soane used in the museum to recreate the warm glow of Mediterranean sunlight. For his contribution, the designer has created an evocative light installation, by sealing the windows of the rear kitchen with layers of coloured film in order to capture the light and cast an atmospheric glow, bringing Soane’s Light into the humble kitchen space Artist and food historian Tasha Marks, Founder of AVM Curiosities, has collaborated with the museum and curators to create an interactive piece of work in response to the historic kitchen and contemporary design’ pieces. She has created a bespoke series of tactile Scent Chambers, consisting in three glass jars which will release evocative aromas to recreate the atmosphere of a working Georgian kitchen.

Bruce Boucher, Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, comments: “We are delighted to be presenting Below Stairs for this year’s London Design Festival and to be collaborating with some of the most exciting and dynamic artists working today. We believe that these contemporary works create a fascinating dialogue with the restored kitchens and the Museum as a whole. They show that the Soane is not a static museum but a dynamic creation in itself, to which designers, artists, and architects continue to respond.”

Rachael Barraclough, curator of Below Stairs says: “There is always a fascination with seeing people’s kitchens, and the Soane Museum kitchen has a natural appeal to it. There is something rather haunting about this once bustling and noisy place that is now oddly, the quietest and calmest part of the museum. We’ve chosen these pieces because they evoke a ghostly reminder of what was.”

Xanthe Arvanitakis, Operations and Commercial Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, says: “It is an honour for us to partner with London Design Festival again, especially now in our fourth year running. It’s not only a wonderful community to be a part of, but allows the Museum to continue to share Sir John Soane’s passion for design with the public and design community.”