Ilse Crawford on Creating Lasting, “Living” Spaces

To the cult British interior and furniture designer Ilse Crawford, interiors too often take a backseat to architecture. Through her humanistic, systems-thinking, “Frame for Life” approach, however, Crawford has shown how interiors and architecture should instead be viewed on the same plane and, as she puts it on this episode of Time Sensitive, “walk hand in hand.” 

Widely known for creating indoor spaces that are notable in their tactility, warmth, and comfort—environments that incorporate, to use her phrase, “visceral materiality”—Crawford oversees her namesake London-based design studio, Studioilse, which she launched in 2003, and whose projects include the first Soho House members’ club in New York, the Ett Hem hotel in Stockholm, and the Cathay Pacific lounges in Hong Kong. Crawford is also the founder of the department of Man and Wellbeing at the Design Academy Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, which she headed for two decades. Prior to her career as a designer, she was the celebrated founding editor of Elle Decoration U.K.

On this episode, Crawford discusses her approach to crafting beautiful, highly original spaces that push against today’s speedy, copy-paste, Instagram-moment world; her early career in media; and her personal definition of the word “slow.”

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

[5:09] StudioIlse

[7:25] A Frame for Life

[58:32] Design Academy Eindhoven

[7:25] Svenkst Tenn

[7:25] Ett Hem

[16:36] Jeanette Mix

[1:02:51] Cathay Pacific

[47:42] Elle Decoration

[29:11] The Eyes of the Skin

[33:52] Alvar Aalto

[33:52] Paimio Sanatorium

[33:52] Christopher Alexander

[31:35] Sensual Home

[35:24] Leonard Koren

[35:46] Frida Escobedo

[47:42] Architect’s Journal

[47:42] The World of Interiors

[47:42] Min Hogg

[52:48] Donna Karan

[54:04] Soho House

[54:04] Babington House

[1:00:08] Home Is Where the Heart Is?