PROFILE: ANNA KARLIN
The English designer ascends utility with her functional sculptures in geometry-driven patterns
When Anna Karlin was just eight years old, she saw American artist Claes Oldenburg’s sculpture Bedroom Ensemble at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The bed and sofa were upholstered in fake tiger fur, the cabinets sheathed in a plasticky blue vinyl and the lampshades covered in a marbleised grey paper. “It was meant tonguein-cheek as bad taste,” says the British designer with a laugh. “But I thought it was absolutely fabulous.” Inspired, she gave her tiny box of a bedroom a makeover à la Oldenburg. In cow print. “I went to the market where they sell fake fur for a pound a metre,” Karlin recollects. “My room was so small I didn’t need much. I covered every surface: the walls, floors, desk, lamp, everything. And I nicked all the white cups from the kitchen and with indelible marker made a matching tea set.” Perched on a graphically upholstered daybed in her sunny Manhattan studio, Karlin thinks back on the absurd makeover and concludes: “I was never going to go and work in an office, that’s for sure.” And she hasn’t. After a five-year stint as an art director and designer in London, Karlin moved to New York in 2010, seeking adventure. But once she established her own successful art direction business, she found herself itching to create something that wasn’t an answer to a client’s brief. The resulting collection comprised stools inspired by chess pieces, elegant glassware, and a light fixture about the size and scale of a hula hoop. She has since added fabrics (a collaboration with Japanese weavers Hosoo), rugs and more furniture and lighting. “It’s just usable sculpture, really,” Karlin says of the pieces, many of which you can see in her neatly jam-packed studio. Though much of her work is assembled here, the components are produced in workshops across New York and the US. Karlin’s inspiration table is covered with a mishmash of odds and ends — clay spoon forms, a metal rod bent into a perfect circle, bits of copper and brass. “It drives the team crazy because we really need the space,” she says, grinning as she glances up at a newish series of Windsor-inspired chairs hanging from the ceiling. But for Karlin that table, along with her shelves displaying “prototypes, beginnings, middles, ends, tests”, are part of a nuanced creative process where inspiration piles up and waits its turn to find its way into one of her collections. “The studio has become this amazing bubble where we can produce what we want when we want,” she says. “There’s not one thing we don’t know how to make or get made… We’ve got the skills to manufacture it.” Asked when the new collections will launch, Karlin replies, “When they’re ready.” That’s a line you’ll never hear in an office.