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Although still a student at the Royal College of Art, Giles Miller has already been commissioned by Stella McCartney to design a panel for her shop in Paris, put his –C collection of cardboard furniture into production and been shortlisted for a designer of the year award.
His girlfriend, Naomi Parry, has an equally impressive CV, being an award-winning stylist for Amy Winehouse and other members of the pop glitterati. It is the combination of their distinctive styles that makes their rented home in Camden, North London, such an entertaining place to visit.
“I found the house a year ago,” says Parry. “It was in a bad decorative state, but I kept the bamboo-print flock wallpaper that was on the wall in the sitting room and that led to the olive-green paint scheme. To cover the walls in the main bedroom, which were badly marked, I mixed up the remains of a number of pots of paint and ended up with a pale, dusky pink shade.
“I really hated the Action Man wallpaper on the stairwell but I never got round to changing it – I’ve since grown rather fond of those cartoon figures. But the Stingray paper in the spare bedroom was just awful – there was something very disturbing about the faces of the puppets, so it had to go.
“As for the furniture, the sofa was here when I moved in, and I covered it in throws and cushions. The upholstered dining chairs came from my mum’s attic and I picked up other items at a flea market in Holloway Road and a second-hand shop in Fortress Road.”
But then, rather unexpectedly, she points out some smart cushions, voile and taffeta curtains and chenille throws that she bought at John Lewis – not quite the boho shop you’d expect her to frequent. “My mother’s a big fan and sometimes I go shopping with her and pick up the odd thing,” she explains.
Miller’s contributions to their home comforts include a number of corrugated cardboard lampshades and a folding screen made as part of one of his early student projects. What makes them especially eye-catching is the integral patterns.
“I started to work with card as part of an assignment I was doing while studying furniture design at Loughborough University,” he says. “The idea was to make forms that homeless people could use to create furniture for themselves from found materials. Then it evolved into something more complex – I had dropped my bag and damaged the laptop inside, so I decided to use cardboard to create a more insulated and protective case.
“I went on to create decoration within the cardboard and discovered that, by cutting and layering the material in different directions, it was possible to make a motif. The first piece I did was the screen by the sitting-room window. It originally had three panels and took two weeks to make, working every day from 8am until 2am. It was an incredible craft project, but now I work with a manufacturer who can replicate the technique with machines,” he says, with audible relief in his voice.
Since then, Miller has added self-assembly pieces to his collection, including a wardrobe – an example in the bedroom houses just a small part of Parry’s vast collection of vintage clothing – and two clocks. A grandfather version by the kitchen window has a small mechanised fitting behind the hands in the top section, leaving the rest as useful pantry space, and there’s a smaller mantel clock in the sitting room.
After showing me round, Miller has to head back to college to put the finishing touches to his graduation show, including his Giant Hairy Wall, created from 70,000 individual plastic ‘hairs’, on ball-and-socket joints, that move when stroked. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the one creation to which Parry seems less than enthusiastic about offering house room.
Show RCA Two, at the Royal College of Art, London SW7, opens on Friday (020-7590 4444; www.rca.ac.uk). www.gilesmiller.com; www.naomiparrystyling.com
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