Art & Design Now 

Sebastian Conran is one of Britain’s top industrial and product designers. He’s designed everything from pushchairs to car interiors, bathtubs to coffee machines. His clients read like a Who’s Who of British Industry. He’s designed for Habitat, Mothercare, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Yo! Sushi!, Marks & Spencers, Tesco and John Lewis, to name just a few.

Sebastian grew up in creative family, his father Sir Terence Conran, a designer and the founder of Habitat and the Conran Group, his mother Shirley Conran, the successful author and journalist.

“My parents were a huge influence on me. They are very interesting people, very open-minded. I got exposed to a lot of ideas at an early age. I don’t think I had a particularly conventional upbringing, but I certainly benefitted from it.”

Paola Navone is a renowned Italian architect & designer, with a career spanning 3 decades. She has designed interiors, furniture, and lighting for top manufacturers, including Alessi, Knoll, Roche Bobois, Swarovski and Habitat.

A modern nomad, Paola has travelled the world, worked as an anthropologist in Cameroon, been a member of the Memphis design movement in Italy, lived and worked with artists in France, Italy, the US, and the Far East. Today she works as an architect, designer, product and essayist, and is a leading figure in European progressive design.

Paola’s work fuses factory mass production and hand crafted techniques, to produce beautiful and surprising objects.

She likes to combine diverse elements with contrasts of texture and colour, with a dream-like playfulness.

She searches out techniques old and new, and combines them in creative and surprising ways. You never quite know what you’re going to see from her next...

Gérard Rancinan is perhaps France’s best know photographer.  His work has regularly been on the covers of Time, Life, Sports Illustrated and Paris Match. He has photographed the rich and famous, artists, politicians, heroes; everyone from the Pope to Claudia Schiffer.

Talented, hard-working and ambitious Rancinan started out, at age 15, as a dark room technician on a provincial newspaper in Bordeaux, by the age of 18 he was the youngest photojournalist in France.

He was signed up by the Sygma Press Agency, and was sent around the world to document strikes, riots, wars, and revolutions.

In the 1970’s he covered events such as the bloody civil war in Lebanon, and an earthquake in Algeria. In the 1980’s he shot Solidarity protests in Poland, and riots in London. As a press photographer he sees himself as a witness to events. He lets the image speak for itself, telling its own story.

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David Chipperfield is one of Britain’s leading contemporary architects. Till recently his work has largely been built overseas, but with the opening of two major projects in the UK, the British public can finally get to experience some of his buildings first hand. The Turner Contemporary in Margate, and the Hepworth in Wakefield have both opened recently.

David Chipperfield studied at Kingston Poly and the Architectural Association in the late 70’s, where he was in the same year as Zaha Hadid. He went on to work for Norman Foster and Richards Rogers, before founding David Chipperfield Architects in 1984.

His first commissions were for shops for Issey Miyake in London and Tokyo, and that led to further projects in Japan. Since then he has designed a wide-variety of buildings, from shops and houses, to museums, libraries and law courts. His buildings can be found everywhere from Shanghai to Valencia.

Growing from an architecture firm employing 15 people, to one with almost 300 employees, David Chipperfield Architects have offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai.