Top Ten Designer Furniture Collaborations

AnOther favourite Phoebe English recently designed a furniture collaboration with boyfriend Sam Edkins – and his work with traditional upholstery, combined with her experimental explorations into form and fabric, has resulted in some slightly creepy-looking (and remarkably brilliant) knitted rubber macramé chairs. But why the move into furniture? "I think that, now and again, I get restless only designing clothes. I guess it’s almost like a break for me to design within different boundaries, and I think its good to stretch yourself and try new things." And of course English isn't the first designer to step out of fashion and into furniture – over the years, many others, from Rick Owens to Jean-Paul Gaultier, have turned their hand from dresses to dressers (chairs, sofas, tables et al) in the quest for new creative horizons. Here, we present a selection of our favourite fashion/furniture combinations.

Fendi
Since the late-80s, Fendi Casa has been making furniture with the aim of “bringing the unique Fendi flavour into homes all over the world.” With collaborations including those with French artist Maria Pergay and architect François-Joseph Graf, the Casa is exceptionally good at representing Fendi’s luxurious yet diverse aesthetic through the medium of furniture design – but our favourite piece has to be this gold-leaf chair, which looks like it’s out of a golden-era Bond film.

Phoebe English
Both English and Edkins’s respective love of craftsmanship and technique comes to the fore in these unsettling yet magnetic creations. "I loved the sleek look they have," explains English, "and this, combined with their slightly tarnished surface, was really interesting because it played off the intensity of the over-sized knitted rubber macrame surface really well." The result might not be something that we want to sit on to eat our dinner, but they are definitely something that we want in our homes.

Margaret Howell x Ercol
In 2002, Margaret Howell started collaborating with iconic British furniture manufacturer Ercol. Her reissues of some of their most celebrated pieces came about after she realised that her favourite chair from childhood was made by the brand, alongside her admiration of "their dependability of craftsmanship, the quality and grain of English woods and above all the adaptability of an enduring quiet elegance." Graceful, timeless and chic are perhaps the major defining points of both brands; it's a match made in design heaven.

Ann Demeulemeester
When Ann Demeulemeester collaborated with Belgian design company Bulo, her resulting creation was this super-chic, super-simple, fabric-covered table: Table Blanche. She explained that, "this table has the virginity of a an unpainted canvas. I wanted to return to the essential shape of a table, like a child would draw it." Conceptual meets practical from the Antwerp Six designer famed for her avant-garde approach – that is, as long as you are careful with your cup of coffee.

Rick Owens
Of course, Rick Owens' furniture creations are wonderfully weird. In AnOther Magazine S/S14, Susannah Frankel explained that her whistle-stop tour of the "magnificient, bare-boned, predominantly nineteenth-century interior" of his Paris home revealed that "wires are left exposed throughout, floors are raw concrete but there's a sable thrown across a day bed as if it were a rag," the ultimate expression of "the luxury of not caring" that Owens has spoken of previously. Originally designing furniture merely because he and wife Michelle Lamy "needed things for the house," you too can now turn your home into an austerely beautiful shrine to the celebrated designer as, in 2007, he branched into commercially-available, limited-edition furniture design.

Loewe
When Jonathan Anderson was appointed Creative Director of Loewe last year, his overhaul of the brand didn't end with reinventing the collections and reviving their archive Stephen Meisel advertising campaigns. He also personally hunted down furniture for the re-designed stores and reinstated new editions of cushions and chairs originally designed in 1959 by Spanish architect and Loewe collaborator Javier Carvajal Ferrer. We particularly love these oversized calf-leather cushions in hues correlating to the collection; finally, your outfit can match your seating arrangement.

Moschino
In 2012, Moschino met with Italian design house Altreforme for a collection that was inspired by harlequin and Italian masks. While they employed much-loved archive fabrics for several of the pieces in the range, our favourite is this surrealist wiry creation that wouldn’t look out of place in a Dalí painting, or our living rooms.

Ralph Lauren
Ralph Lauren Home offers the bounteous array of iconic American-style furnishings that you might expect from the heritage brand, from its Downtown Modern monochromes to the desert-retreat vibe of the Corral Canyon collection. But it is this Cote d’Azure bedside dresser from the nautical-inspired Porte De Riviera collection, with its emphatic nod to art deco elegance, that really floats our boat (or rather, yacht).

Jean Paul Gaultier
Jean Paul Gaultier’s creations for Roche Bobois include this reimagining of their Mah Jong modular sofa, incorporating his famous sailor print into domestic upholstery. It’s weird, and funny, and even better than the corseted pillows he also designed for the brand. Plus, it looks like it could also make a très-chic and très-comfortable sofa bed.

Louis Vuitton
In honour of their Celebrating Mongram project, which invited six creative icoloclasts to reinterpret the classic Louis Vuitton monogram, Cindy Sherman designed this ridiculously good trunk set for the brand. As if anything could make us want a Louis Vuitton dressing table/suitcase/chest of drawers any more that we already do, it's the legendary photographer turning it into a carnivalesque rainbow.

Notable mentions
Notable mentions for some of our favourite homeware accessories go to Claire Barrow's spoons, Maison Margiela's L'Oeuf doorstops and Christian Lacroix teapots.