The Change Artist

In a Victorian townhouse in East London, the designer Faye Toogood has built a work space that honours both her distinct eye and the certainty of impermanence.

- Nancy Hass

UNCOMPLICATED BEAUTY HAS never interested the designer Faye Toogood. She doesn’t care about what’s in fashion; in fact, she would prefer her work make you uneasy, suddenly unsure of what year it is, even what century. Such disorientation is embedded, like an alien fossil, in the oeuvre of the polymathic Toogood, 42, who has for the last decade created objects, furniture, clothing and residential interiors that seem simultaneously futuristic and prehistoric: chairs with backs like the handle of a garden spade; sparsely furnished Georgian homes with murky gray walls and metal cage bookshelves; oversize, genderless garments of boiled wool and ivory canvas. She is widely considered to be the most poetic of contemporary design’s minimalists.

Further proof: the London building where she and her staff of 15 have worked since 2016, in the formerly bohemian Shoreditch neighborhood. The vertiginously thin, four-story, 1,800-square-foot Victorian townhouse had been a downtrodden squat; the landlord offered a reduced rent with a four-year lease. Many creative entrepreneurs long for a relatively permanent home to laboriously — and expensively — sculpt into a showroom, but Toogood, who spent nearly a decade as a stylist and editor at The World of Interiors magazine in the 2000s, is untroubled by potential displacement: