Speaker 1:
Here we are at Warren Street Hotel in Tribeca. There's a sense of arrival even from the outside because the building itself is a blue colour, not only bright blue, but it's got a very yellow top to it, and always looks like a summer's day. And from the moment you enter, there's a little sense of adventure.
I think it's important when you enter the lobby to have an instant personality and the artworks and colours just correspond with that. So as you make an entrance, overhead, there's a large chandelier, the shape of a half moon, and then my fabulous Zig Zag wallpaper. So there's a sense of movement. It is something which is bold, but it's not frantic. The artwork is interesting. We are very much into craft, so there's always that crafted feel about the building. As we turn to the left, there's a Christopher Kurtz Skipping Stone table. He named it after skipping stones which bounce onto the water, and beside it, the basket towers by Cristian Mohaded, who's an Argentinian artist. And we just love that wonderful organic feel. Beside that, is this masterful artwork by an African artist called Sanaa Gateja. He's from Uganda. They call him the Bead King of Africa. Because if you look closely, you can see it's all made of paper beads.
It's just so bright, it's so colorful, it's very ornamental. And it's called, Once Upon a Time. It stands its own against this monumental sculpture by Tony Cragg, who's one of our favourite artists. It's a veined black marble. And as you walk around it, it tells you different things. There are different shapes. Is it a womans figure? Is it the shape of a mans head? What is going on here? It's monumental, it's large, and yet it's not obtrusive. To me, it works very well within this space. We then see a Vanessa Gunston fabulous abstract artwork, and it contrasts so beautifully against the green. On the right, just by the elevator is a beautiful large Terry Frost, and he works very well with Joe Tilson, who is another artist that we've used. So it's a really fun area and sets the mould for the hotel. It's the start of a design thread, which is quite congruent. There's something which you recognise works like an intelligent thread through the building.
As we walk through to the Drawing Room, what I wanted to achieve was just one of those calm spaces, something which embraces you, which is probably slightly more conservative than the other areas. And the colours within this room are also warm. They're reds and then lots of navy as well coming through. And I think it's all about texture in here. Whether it's the wonderful Chelsea Textiles beautiful crewel work on these 50's shaped chairs, or whether it's the lovely weave on the sofa or whether in fact it's the artwork. And the artwork in here to the right of the fireplace is a Gary Bunt. We were approached by the Saatchi Gallery because they noticed that Gary had painted one of our fabrics, which we'd actually created for Chelsea Textiles called Moon Dog within the painting itself.
And Gary Bunt always has his favourite characters that appear over and over within his paintings. And one of them is his father wearing braces, and another is his terrier dog. So it's a very nostalgic, wonderful painting, and it's like a eureka moment. You suddenly find these pieces of artwork, these things which you know are just right. So we felt that it really had to come here. Beneath it is a games table where you can either play chess or you can play backgammon. You can sit and have a very serious game. Then there's a round library table where you can have a discussion or a meeting. And that sits in front of a wonderful old cupboard that we found. And we asked Tess Newall, who lives down by Charleston, so she's very influenced by the Bloomsbury Group and she repainted it for us.
Beside that is another artwork by Sanaa Gateja and an armchair, which of course we've collaged because nobody does collage like we do. And we have a wonderful collage artist called Kumi. So we have a bird on a branch. And the table beside it has got sculptures by Henry Neville Wood. And we asked him to do sculptures in wood of famous explorers. So here we've got three of them. This is a room which has to have a sense of arrival. It has to work from early morning through to late at night. And what I want to achieve when you come into the room is that you don't see everything at once. It's when you come back time and time again, you might find those details that you didn't notice the first time around.