Haberdashery is led by original founders Mac Cox and Ben Rigby, through a common desire to produce narrative-driven design through light. Haberdashery collaborates with some of the world’s leading architects, interior designers, developers, brands and institutions – and have now installed almost 500 projects in over 30 countries across the world.

Haberdashery was invited to design an installation for the drawing room of Rigby and Rigby’s Grosvenor Square development. Says Ben: “We have worked on interiors projects for about 10 years, always high-end bespoke developments and either with interior designers or end clients. However, increasingly, we are building relationships with developers and architects directly too as it creates opportunities to get involved much earlier in projects and to respond to the raw architecture, light and space of a development.

“We are design engineers with artistic sensibilities, rather than artists, fabricators or manufacturers and our aim is to help developers to differentiate their development from the one next door by creating a narrative, a story in each development which gives it a personality and focus which is appealing to clients.

“For the Grosvenor Square apartment, lead designer Alex Sanchez developed a 600-piece array using our flexible leaf-based system, which was manufactured in Stoke on Trent from the finest bone china, with each piece hand-finished in either 14 carat gold lustre or white glaze. As it is such fine bone china it is almost transparent and transmits light beautifully. It creates stunning shadows, particularly when lit from above and it is designed to create a flowing shape throughout the space, across the central seating area in the drawing room.

“We use CAD design for all of our installations to create precise layouts which accommodate factors such as the dimensions and sources of light in the space, physical factors such as ceiling heights and where furniture will be placed. We created a floor plan of where each piece would be hung and lasered up from the floor to specify the exact wire thread lengths for each individual leaf. All in all, it took our team about two days to install.

“Our biggest practical issue with all installations is dust and, of course the arrival of furniture during or after an installation, so we are quite often the very last people out of the door during a development. Our largest installations to date include a 6,000-piece leaf design in development which will take several weeks to install and some spectacular projects for Selfridges and British Land where we have been involved right from the outset.

“At present, 70% of our installations are overseas, but as we explore more opportunities to work with super prime specialists like Rigby and Rigby I am looking forward to spending more time at home. I have really enjoyed working with Rigby and Rigby, I think they share many of our values around delivering to extremely high standards without losing sight of the schedule or budget and I look forward to building a long-term relationship with them.”