The magazine Deco Home (03/2020) published a wonderful interview I did with my two colleagues Allison Block (Design Director Travers) and Elodie Deletoille (Design Director Etamine) during the Deco Off in Paris in January 2020. Since many colleagues and friends asked me for an original version in English, I want to make it available here in full length to all of you.

Fredericke: Such a rare and precious circumstance that the three of us are physically able to sit together and not communicating via text. Since you both have just launched your first collections for Zimmer & Rohde and I am about to finalize my second, it feels like a good moment to reflect on our brands and what makes them unique and different from each other.

Elodie: Well, at the center of the DNA of Etamine is color, specifically French colors. And French paintings are a good first way to look at them. It is then that you can catch an international point of view about what is considered French color, and that is where the idea for my first collection came. When I was in the Matisse Museum a year ago I thought it was interesting to keep this in mind. The second step was to create a precise color concept. I wanted to focus on flowers, and decided to explore seasonal colors: winter colors which are more snow white, pearl and grey. Then spring colors: the purples, the fresh greens. And if you go further into summer, the colors are more generous with warm pink, apricot, orange and lemon yellow. I finished the palette with more rustic Autumnal colors like a terracotta, warm beige and burgundy.

Allison: Interestingly, my starting point was very different. I felt like the brand itself had lost its identity a bit over the past few years and for my first Travers collection it was important to me to find a way back the brands roots. I started by scouring the design archive, and it is there I found 3 designs to revive in my first launch, one of which was the original document for the elephant print ‘Singita Parade’. This print was sort of the birth place for the ‘Out of Africa’ collection. I saw this pattern and I thought ‘I have to use this!’ It was then that I started layering in other designs and patterns that worked well together to create a larger story. Original artwork was developed to create an embroidered Safari scene to round out the collection. Similarly, for the ‘Central Park’ collection it started with the two main designs. During the same week I first found a floral document in the archive of an Italian printing mill and then I saw the ‘Central Park Toile’ in the design portfolio of my intern. There were two very different stories and I wanted to explore both, so instead of one large collection I created two smaller ones.

Elodie: I had to start from scratch, because there is no Etamine archive, which makes it difficult. Of course I worked with mill archives. I found ‘Le Bouquet’ in the archive of a printing mill in Manchester and ‘Polynésie’ at a mill near Lake Como in Italy.

Allison: For color I don’t work with a set color palette. I like to think of color independently for each design, with the intention to be cohesive as the designs work together. In America it’s a little bit different where we don’t want the same green or the same blue across every pattern in the collection. I love to have the nuance and the cast twists to create this larger lifestyle story.

Fredericke: Before developing a collection for Hodsoll McKenzie I invest a lot of time in the research. And then during the process of development, it’s important for me to remind myself about my initial excitement during the research stage. What was the original document that I was amazed about in the first place? Often I push documents and designs further with coloration and by modernizing the patterns. I sometimes lose the big picture of the original during this process. And then I go back and notice that it was more about the blue that excited me, and I suddenly know that I must conserve this blue. I always try to keep the original color of my documents in the loop until the last decision phase.

Allison: Yes, It’s interesting to see how you can come full circle sometimes. I too always try to include the original documentary colorway in the mix. I’ve been coloring multicolored prints for 15 years and the quirky unexpected color combinations found in the original historical documents are something I like to preserve. For instance, we included the original coloration for ‘Cape Floral’ in the collection. The design came from the mill in the UK and the colors on the historical document really suited the print. We included it even though it doesn’t necessarily layer into the larger color palettes. I like to think that everything has to stand on its own independent of the larger collection.

Fredericke: Developing a Hodsoll McKenzie collection, I focus on three processes at the same time. The first is entirely emotional, I see fabrics or designs and I fall in love. Here I often notice that I always go for a certain texture or color, maybe even one I did not like before and all of a sudden it speaks to me. Then there is the technical process, for instance, introducing a certain new category or style in the collection. The third process is intellectual. Since I am a design theorist, which means that I studied the psychology, philosophy and history of design, I decide on a particular moment of British design history as inspiration. And from there I explore the collection. So for 2020 I went back to the 19th century and the beginning of industrialism to capture the tension of traditional handcraft versus new industrial techniques of manufacturing textiles. This theme is important for the DNA of Hodsoll McKenzie.

Allison: Our two approaches are so different. It’s very rare for me to be able to have such a clear point of view of what I am trying to accomplish before I start working. It is a much more organic process as I collect and see how I want it to take shape. It’s just kind of incredible when I start layering the qualities, designs and patterns together, how they start to take on their own personality and character. There will always be a starting point and then the theme solidifies as I start working.

Elodie: I went to this exhibition of Henri Matisse and I found it to be a good guideline, but I do not stick 100% to these guidelines. I store it somewhere in my head, but do not focus on that to create my collection. I like to fall in love with the designs I find in the archives of mills and suppliers. Designs can talk to me, I think about how maybe they may have a chance in the collection and how I can tell a story. The structure of the collection is more about how a room is designed. As soon as I select a design I determine its use. Is it for the living room because it’s more expensive and people want to show it off? Or is it maybe more discreet and would it create a very relaxed and cozy bedroom interior? A sheer might be the perfect choice for the kitchen because it’s washable. I always try to picture how it will be used. This is very important for me.

Allison: I feel that for Travers I wanted to build a lifestyle brand, meaning that the collections offer a complete range of fabrics to use throughout the home. This year we’ve added a new category for Travers. We did not have wide width sheers, and it felt like a missed opportunity. And so when I’m creating a collection I am thinking about the need for upholsteries, draperies, decoration and sheers. It is important to also consider every room and house, otherwise you again loose opportunities. That is why I believe color is so important. You can sort of decide what environment and room in the house you want to put the textile based on mood and color creates this mood.

Elodie: Personally my favorite room is living room, with the main focus on my fireplace. I love the moments when you are around the fireplace, even in summer. It is the place where you join people and I like to make this area really comfortable, to gather important people around me. I have beautiful paintings on my wall. When developing the Etamine collection I also like to combine art, furniture, architecture and see how they talk to the textiles.

Allison: Same here, I am always thinking about the living room first, the coziest room where you entertain and have people over, where you want to sit and chat. It’s the room you use the most and where I think there is the most design opportunity. I also always tell my friends that when they are thinking about decorating their homes, they don’t need an interior designer to do the entire home at once. They should start with the most important rooms, the living room, the bedroom and the kitchen. I think these three rooms are the ones where you spend the most time and need to feel most comfortable.

Fredericke: The most important room for me personally, because I am using it so passionately, is my kitchen. And I love open kitchen spaces that are connected to the living room. I often cook for people and I want to be with them while I am cooking. I just recently moved into a new house and of course the first thing I did was to design my own kitchen. I really like rooms which are not that easy to decorate with textiles. Whereas it’s clear that you need fabrics for the living room and the sleeping room, it can be a challenge in the entrance hall. This should be an interesting room, but it’s often the emptiest space. Designing it should almost be like an exhibition space. In real life, especially in a family home, it is always full with things. Guests enter your home and can explore your spirit. I love to show artwork and photographs that are important my creative family: work of my father who is a passionate laymen sculptor, the graffiti art of my son and souvenir photos from my partner, who is a music editor.

Elodie: I agree, my second favorite place would be the entrance. It’s the first thing you see when entering a home. And it’s like with a person: the first impression is really important. And for me, when I come back home I want to immediately feel at home. I have a small sofa with pillows in the entrance just to remove my jacket and shoes.

Allison: One of the images from my photoshoot shows the entrance way of the home that we shot. I hadn’t thought about decorating an entrance this grand before. But as I began scheming, the decision to make a screen with the elegant lampas and pillows for the bench in the linen floral created this elevated environment that set a welcoming tone for what was to come deeper into the house. So I agree that it’s really important.

Elodie: I just moved into a new very modernist home that we designed for three years with an architect and I wanted to install these beautiful fully embroidered curtains, like Sonja Delaunays. To feel like it was a museum on my wall, to give it a further function than only covering the windows.

Allison: You two live in these beautiful homes, I live in New York City where apartments tend to be much smaller. My living environment is a collection of treasures I’ve bought during my travels and it’s really layered together to feel super cozy. But for the longest time I wanted it to be more neutral because we work so much with color and... E: Aaah, I agree!

Fredericke: Me too. I had this problem with my clothes too, for the longest time I was only wearing black. Just shortly colors came back into my closet. A: For a very long time my apartment was more neutral, cozy but neutral. And only recently did I have this breakthrough, where I really wanted to add color. And I bought a new rug and I changed the chair and pillows. It’s very different now when I walk in and it just proves that making a subtle change like new throw pillows on your sofa can start to change the DNA of your environment. F: What made you change?

Allison: Honestly, I don’t know. I think maybe it has to do with the change of job positions. Being a design director means I can really be more focused at work. I can spend a lot more time on the layout and coloring of designs; being more methodical and having the time to give each design the respect that it deserves to make it perfect. Whereas before as a senior designer at another company I felt that I needed to get as much done as I possibly could in the shortest amount of time and I wasn’t really able to be intentional about it. I think my brain was a little more frantic. And now, because I can be a lot more focused during my day I have more opportunity to be more relaxed in my home.

Elodie: Decorating was a crucial part of my education because my family deals antiques. And since I was a child everything in my home changed frequently. My father would buy a painting and a day later it was sold. Sometimes a table would stay for five or six years, but eventually it got sold too. As a young kid I would change my bedroom making use of my father’s furniture storage. Still today I love the creative process and the fact that I can always open an new chapter. As soon as I move something in my home I personally have the feeling that also something new can happen. The page is now white and I can start again.

Fredericke: That’s funny because I had a very similar experience in my childhood. We were living in an little estate house built in the 1920’s in South West Germany right next to the French border. The style is quite similar to the house I live in now, with beautiful wooden floors, a fire place in the living room and a large garden that was given to miners back then for self-sufficiency. My mother, she would change the interior every year. Not only the interior but also the function of the rooms, the kitchen became the study; the living room was the sleeping room all of a sudden. I loved it. Of course she would start those projects right before big events like Christmas or a big birthday. I can remember our huge family parties, in rooms that slightly smelled of paint. I loved the creativity of my mother.

Allison: My experience is so different from both of yours. My parents still live in the house that they moved into when I was eight months. The house has changed, they’ve added an addition and it’s been redone, but the function of each room has always remained the same. It’s been frequently redecorated, my mother loves interiors and I think my love for interiors and textiles comes from her. If she had known that this was an opportunity for a profession, she would have gone into the arts. So the house itself is very much the house I grew up in. There is this familiarity to it and I think I really like that it has always very much felt like home.

Elodie: I changed homes 18 times with my parents due to the fact that they always loved to renovate and to change. We moved from the North of France to the South and back. F: Isn’t it interesting? Because it’s said that the Americans love to move and leave everything behind and start something new and the Europeans prefer to stay at one place.

Allison: Oh, I didn’t know that about us. (laughs) Even in NYC, and I’ve lived here for almost 15 years, I’m only in my third apartment. I lived in my first apartment with my best friend for a couple of years and then I moved off on my own to a studio, and now I live in a one bedroom apartment in the same building and on the same floor of my former studio apartment. It’s the apartment next door! And I never really thought about this but I think I find it really important to put down roots. Things change so much around me all the time that I like to think of home as a constant.

Fredericke: Nevertheless we often tell each other that something we say or do is so French, so American, and so German!

Allison: Everybody in Germany always reminds me how American I am. And I don’t fully know what that means or if it’s a compliment or not. I think there’s one thing about Americans: We’re loud! We make sure that you know that we’re here. Yesterday we had two international sales meetings in the morning and then at four o’clock the Americans arrived and the noise level was raised so high, and there was so much energy. I felt much more at home and I didn’t realize how much more relaxed I got when it was filled with noise. Maybe that’s very American.

Elodie: I would say the French lifestyle is very eclectic. And this you can also feel in the French people. You can be classical today and casual tomorrow. And this is a part of the way we design and how we live. I could live in a five star hotel and next time I prefer the one star hotel because the view is beautiful. It’s more about emotions and the inside of things. The French creative people I meet always work with their heart. And after my presentation people told me that I am talking with my heart. Maybe this is French? Secondly I like to be ‘comme l’air,’ relaxed and to not mind too much about things. But in the end I usually reach my goals.

Fredericke: I learned how German I am when I lived in Paris in 1999: always on time, always trying to anticipate and deeply in love with structures. And whereas you both can fall back to your culture when designing your collections it’s different for me. I can remember last year at Deco Off in January, when I represented Hodsoll McKenzie for the first time, before my first collection was set to launch in the fall. I met a highly important sales agent from the States and he was very critical from the start. He looked down on me and said: ‘A German wants to design a British collection for the American Market? Well, good luck!’ and I love quoting this, because this was my first question. Will I be able to achieve a credible result? However, I quickly realized that the brand identity, the special attention to natural materials, the soft colors and the deep roots in design history, is so me! Plus I had worked for British companies before and through my studies in design history I have a very clear idea of British lifestyle. I just had to find my own approach. So I created this British collection for the American market and all of a sudden in Russia people love the collection. This is a great opportunity for Hodsoll McKenzie. One design in particular is selling very strong in Italy and so this country is on my plate too. In the end we are creating collections for the global market.

Allison: Even though different countries have generalizations that we think are indicative of them, there is always going to be an exception, always something that surprises us about what’s popular. Even here at Deco Off I am seeing all the different countries response to the Travers collection. Even though it’s to be sold globally, America is at its core and I have to primarily design for the American market. This includes how we show the fabrics in the shoots. I was going through the books with one of our European agents and she was pointing to one of the photos and how we were showing the fabric and told me how American it was and that they would never use the fabric this way. Shortly after this she was showing the collection to a customer and they were interested in that same fabric, but maybe not to be used in the same way.

Elodie: Same here, Zimmer & Rohde asked me to design a French collection, but our main market is not France, it’s the US followed by Germany and then the UK. I like this challenge. It reminds me of the Haute Couture in France that nowadays sells mainly outside of France. I asked myself, what do people outside France think of as French style? So I adapt my answer to each part of the world when I design my collection. For instance, ‘Le Bouquet’ is more classical and would be Etamine for the UK while ‘Polynésie’ which is much more modern, would be Etamine for Belgium. What’s nice is that I chatted with our agent in Belgium and she told me the three assumed bestsellers for Belgium, and her choices are exactly what I designed with Belgium in mind.

Allison: There are a lot of similarities between the Hodsoll British design sensibility and Travers American design sensibility, what should set us apart is color. British colors are much more faded and dusty.

Fredericke: True, and there is also a difference in how we use documents. Your documents are normally very clear. For Hodsoll they look more vintage, very faded and even a bit disrupted. In my collection for 2019 I play a lot with this fading effect. For example, the print ‘Andresweald’ is a very abstract leaf print that reminds me of the marks of wet leaves on the concrete during autumn. I included a beautiful indigo blue, one of my personal favorite colors. The blues along with the aquas are typical Hodsoll colors. These light green and blue hues are very British. At the moment I see a lot of monochromatic interiors in greens and blues, even dark tones. Also every shade of greige, creating a beautiful warm and cold interplay, leaving their role of being the boring commercial classic and becoming really cool. I’m seeing plenty of monochrome rooms fully kept in greige and only one color spot, like a yellow chair.

Allison: Blue of every cast, shade and value is the main color story for Travers. From very light sky blue to very dark rich indigo to true porcelain blue and white. Blue is always going to be number one in America. Whereas my personal favorite color of the collection is the emerald green. I love real rich jewel tones.

Elodie: I love the greens too, and also the yellows and natural tones. And I am really obsessed with the yellow that was launched in my collection. Germany was so afraid about my yellow because it was so true. They wanted it to be more pale or with grey. But my yellow was the one you can find in nature. I was happy to talk to an editor this morning who loved particularly my yellow. So this was maybe really French, because I did not fight for my yellow but I challenged my direction to keep many yellows in the collection, and customers and editors appreciate it. Maybe it won’t sell as good as the other colors...

Allison: ... but it will for sure create the buzz! Just like the ‘Greensward Bouquet’ in the Travers collection which goes against our typical floral designs, which usually have a quirky stem and unusual flowers, like the Jacobean Floral. But the large scale and distressed detailing of this historical floral is so classical that it will always be popular.

Elodie: In case of Etamine it’s the multicolored flowers which are not traditional nor historical, and are a bit playful. That’s what I like about the Henri Matisse paintings and that’s what I like about Etamine. How about Hodsoll? F: We also will always work with historic documents, could be flowers but also geometric patterns. Great Britain is very proud of its arts and crafts movement in the 19th century. That’s why a lot of designs today date back to this time or refer to it. When we are talking about English florals, we often have the refined illustrations of William Morris, Owen Jones or Charles Rennie MacIntosh in mind. And that’s what also America relates with British design, even though there are plenty of important styles that came before and after, both of which are what I would like to explore for Hodsoll McKenzie.

Allison: I think it helps that we have each other in this way, that we are all three very different, from different countries with different approaches to how we do things, but are also completely supportive of one another. We are a nice trio, a team that cares for each other.

Fredericke: And though we are different, I feel that we share a vision and this makes us really strong together.