CHARLOTTE REY

Designer Charlotte Rey on daily rituals, setting a beautiful table, and being a first-time gardener.

If there’s anything Charlotte Rey can’t do, we’re yet to hear of it. She’s the co-founder, designer and creative director at Campbell Rey, and manages to do elegance and irreverence with equal ease, and at the same time. Her work spans books, interiors, and products - to name just a few. Think: jewel toned drinkware, Parisian hotels, fancy art exhibitions. To scroll through her instagram feed (swirls of colour! pops of foliage! Vintage sinks!!!!) is to feel you’ve got the spare keys to some fabulous artist’s countryside villa. But seriously.

Here we chat to Charlotte, who spent her lockdown in Central London with her boyfriend, about daily rituals, wildflower raves, and setting a beautiful table.

Charlotte, we’re in awe of you. Where did your love of all things beautiful come from?

Oh wow, thank you. And good question! Right. I think it came from my parents actually, they were quite adventurous in their tastes. They travelled a lot and would spend a lot of time in galleries, shops and markets looking for beautiful things. They took me to places like Fondation Maeght and Louisiana outside Copenhagen from when I was very little. We had a mad collection of everything from mid-century Italian furniture (when it wasn’t so fashionable) to a shell-shaped marble bathroom sink picked up in a market in Ramatuelle for a song. I remember my dad lugging a 15 kilogram antique chopping block for a whole day around a market that he’d found and didn’t think about how to get home. Well, ‘home’. It sat in the garage for years!

Paint us a picture of your quarantined life. What is / was a typical day for you?

I’m an early riser and that didn’t change during lockdown. I would wake up around 6:30-7am and make coffee before sitting down and tiptapping out some emails. Then when my boyfriend woke up we’d have breakfast together and do a round of the garden. Our garden is not big but we’re both first time gardeners so every day has been hugely exciting and interesting. It’s also probably what has kept us sane and sometimes, friends! Then I’d work away during the day, checking in with producers and deliveries, sourcing and confirming sourced purchases for clients, ordering samples, making drawings and putting together proposals. Then we’d make some late lunch, do some exercise to a varying degree of success, and go for a walk along the river. We live close to the river in Chiswick and the Chiswick Eyot is walking distance. There’s the sweetest little Italian deli there called Mari. Mario and his mother, the owners, always have the most delicious treats so we would stop by there for a sfogliatelle before returning home for dinner that my boyfriend invariably cooks or I order. I’m a bit lazy like that.

You are one part of a design-duo, did a physical lockdown affect the way you are able to collaborate creatively?

Not really, Duncan and I have worked together for more than ten years so we are very in tune with each other and communicate in an incessant stream of texts, pictures and calls so that doesn’t change much wherever we are.

What are you most excited about at the moment?

My garden. It’s just wild how exciting growing dahlias can be! I really didn’t think much was going to come out of the ground in central London but lo and behold it’s now a wildflower rave. We were going for a pink and white scheme mostly but now a few months later we’re seeing all kinds of colours from some of the seeds.

You have, unshockingly, a solid knack for setting tables. What advice would you give to someone wanting to make an ordinary dinner party look a bit festive? But very last minute!!

I really love strong colours and bold patterns so I’d say pile it on. Lisa Corti does really lovely summer-y tablecloths and placemats. Get some nice coloured candles or glassware like blue, green and citrine and mix them up. Don’t care too much for symmetry. Flowers, big and small, easily put in tumblers. And my favourite – put some fruit and veggies on the table for decoration. Some gorgeous gourds in the autumn or beautiful lemons in the summer look really lovely.

What makes a room a place you’d like to spend a lot of time in?

Did being at home so much change the way you think about design or the way we interact with our spaces? Comfort I think is very important. And by that I don’t mean a leather fold-out TV armchair that dominates a room, but more in the subtle details. I think people don’t think so much today about how to make a room a gentle and comfortable experience.

My friend Dimonah who runs the gorgeous wallpaper company Iksel Decorative Arts once described to me that she likes things to be “gentle on the eye” – which I agree with very much. It doesn’t mean that everything has to be beige, but more that a room works together in harmony and develops in front of you as you experience it. This is all about little details – layered materials, little decorative pieces, lovely books, comfortable cushions with a lavender bag hidden in the sofa, a drinks tray, lovely drinking glasses...

It’s about considering the human experience within a space that feels beautiful and generous and respecting that even a small object can bring much joy. My experience of my own home didn’t change much in the past few months as I think I already had a quite strong idea of what I liked in my immediate surroundings. However, I think for a lot of people, it really did. And I think this can only be healthy in the greater scheme of things, that people will live better and put themselves at the centre of their own experience more.

We love your clever and unapologetic use of colour. Is there a particular era that inspires you? Or place, maybe?

All of them do. Even the ones that don’t use colour, as the absence of it then inspires me. I’m often drawn to jewel tones as they feel warm and a bit sexy, and to neons, as they feel rebellious and fun. Colour changes so much depending on the material it is applied to - Joel Arthur Rosenthal, the master jeweller (so worth looking up), the only jeweller to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, said famously “Colour, is as much the object as the shape” and I can only agree.

Which things in your home bring you the most joy?

​ My books. They’re heavy and a pain to lug around but they’ve survived every move and they make me really happy. Then there’s a few nostalgic things, like an Alessandro Albrizzi lucite ice bucket that I was given as a gift that I love, some small malachite boxes. A Bridget Riley print I found cheaply in a market stall. A large photograph by my friend Tinko Czetwertynski (@tinkaud) of a wave in the sea outside Ipanema in Rio, he’s a really wonderful photographer. And of course, the original sample of our Campbell-Rey pink and green marble table which was a milestone for us as designers.

The lockdown restrictions are beginning to relax somewhat! What was the first thing you did when life started returning to ‘normal’?

On the night when the restaurants opened, a little crew of us got really dressed up and we went to a restaurant. It felt marvellously indulgent and luxurious. I can’t wait to do that again.