French-born furniture designer Olivier Droillard has a thing about square shapes, and it doesn’t take long at his North London home before you start noticing them. Table tops are made up of coloured cubes, decorative panels full of right angles hang like paintings on walls, and even the key holder in the hall consists of a series of hinged boxes. The colourful bathroom floor picks up on the theme, as do the four square roof lights in the boxy extension at the rear of the house. There are angular panels in the shutters in the sitting room, and so it goes on. It’s difficult not to become square-eyed.

The inspiration for many of these colourful combinations – and for the tables and wall panels that Droillard makes – comes from Habitat rather than the works of Mondrian. “When I was a child, my pocket money would stretch to buying simple picture frames and small papier-mâché and plywood boxes at Habitat,” says Droillard. Coincidentally, Habitat have recently produced two of his designs, the Dita wall panel and coffee table, which launched in stores last month.

“I like boxes. They can contain treasures and surprises, and in my tables and consoles they can also conceal clutter and keep your possessions in order. I also enjoy the fact that there is a hidden depth, another level to the pieces. You look at them at first and think that the cubes are solid, but then you discover that some aren’t.”

As well as being a venue in which to display his love of squares and boxes, the house that Droillard and his partner bought nine years ago has also been a place for him to hone his skills and develop his furniture designs. “The house was a Kurdish refugee shelter – everything was covered in plywood, and the place had been divided into 11 bedrooms with three shower cubicles in the basement, where we now have the kitchen.” Once the rooms were reorganised to provide three bedrooms and two bathrooms, Droillard started on the decoration.

Having graduated from the London Metropolitan University with an MA in design, Droillard added a City & Guilds qualification in textiles and upholstery, so was able to run up the curtains and cushions and to re-cover chairs and sofas. He also padded and buttoned the wall between the main bedroom and bathroom with powder-blue fake suede. “It provides good sound insulation from the bathroom and gives a muted quality to conversation in the room. It is also soft to touch, and contrasts with the hardness of the ivory-painted panelling on the other walls,” he says.

The dining room is another area where Droillard focused his attention, starting with stripping and restoring the glass-panelled doors between the small front anteroom and the central main dining space. The long elegant dining table came from Purves & Purves, but the chairs were copied and adapted from an original that Droillard bought when he lived in Paris.

“I found the original chair, a Twenties model with arms, more than 12 years ago and it lay around in a decrepit state for ages. I wanted to wait until I had the skill to do something with it. When we moved here, I found a carpenter in Hoxton who made three copies of the chair with arms and created four more, in the same style but without arms, and then I upholstered them.”

Another French find was the supplier of the colourful tiles in the main bathroom. “We found the tiles while visiting Lyons in southeast France and shipped them back. They were much cheaper than anything we could source here, but then we discovered that they weren’t sealed, so that any oil or grease marked them. In the end, we had to apply a seal ourselves.”

The crystal chandelier in the small anteroom to the dining room and the green antique bedside table in the main bedroom are also both French, but were bought from a shop in Crouch End. Other additions, such as the rotating desk chair in the bedroom, were found on the streets in and around Stoke Newington.

Then Droillard added some of his own works, the colourful box tables and wall-mounted panels. The latter, he explains, came about by accident. “Three years ago I was exhibiting at the Chelsea Crafts Fair and the floor area of my small stand was so packed with tables that I took the legs off some, and put the tops up on the wall so they became like pictures. And people bought them like that and commissioned more in their own combinations of colours.” And so a new line was born, and more are in the offing, with commissions for a room divider and an illustrated advent calendar for the 60th anniversary of Contemporary Applied Arts. It seems that there are limitless possibilities for thinking outside the box.

Olivier Droillard’s work is part of the exhibition Hue, Line & Form, which runs until November 2 at Contemporary Applied Arts, 2 Percy Street, London W1 (020 7436 2344; www.caa.org.uk )

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