WE ARE FAMILY
Designer Kit Kemp’s new Wedgwood range
Hotel life has always been a family affair for Kit Kemp, the award-winning design director of Firmdale Hotels. For three decades, with her cofounder husband, Tim, she has blazed a revolutionary trail across the London and New York boutique hotel scene since opening Dorset Square Hotel in 1985. Now, their youngest daughters, Willow, 31, and Min, 28, have joined the family foray (eldest daughter Tiffany, 32, is based near the family home in Hampshire). With backgrounds in art and design, architectural graduate Willow, working with her mother since 2012, has an innate feel “for scale and dimension”, says Kemp; Min, a graphic designer, on the team since 2014,
“is fiery and colourful, often much more than me”, she laughs.
Both daughters contribute in myriad ways: Min loves to seek out exciting young artists, while Willow works on many of the finer details of Kemp’s designs, including Sailor’s Farewell, the pattern now gracing the designer’s second fine bone china collection for Wedgwood launched recently (available in Australia in early 2019). Based on the pattern for a hand-embroidered fabric originally designed for London-based Chelsea Textiles, Kemp says the idea first came to her after admiring a John Craxton painting of a lady on a rock waving goodbye to her sailor husband. Kemp has applied seafaring motifs, from lighthouses and whale tails to sailing ships and seagulls, to the edges and centres of teacups and saucers, milk jugs and egg cups, plates, platters and bowls —all set against a blue linen-effect backdrop. Like Mythical Creatures, Kemp’s first Wedgwood collection in 2014, each piece will be handfinished with gold.
A folkloric playfulness has long been a theme in Kemp’s work, from the fabrics and wallpapers she designs with British textile brand Christopher Farr to the hand-embroidered headboards and cushions she has created in collaboration with the prison charity Fine Cell Work. For the five wallpapers and six fabrics Kemp launched recently with London design emporium Andrew Martin, she worked with British artist Melissa White. Previously the pair had created Mythical Land, a three-metre-repeat mural wallpaper, for the private events spaces at Manhattan’s The Whitby Hotel. With this new collection, they’ve brought patterns like Friendly Folk, Hedgerow and Wychwood to life by teaming tapestry-inspired mythical creatures (dragons, foxes, lions and birds) with pared-back pastoral scenes.
In early 2019, Kemp will publish her third book, Design Thread (Hardie Grant), filled with stories about the things the designer loves most — a richness of colour and exuberant pattern, tactile textures and the soul of pieces handcrafted and finished. “[It exemplifies] all those whimsical details that make guests look twice,” Kemp says. “When someone wants to know more about what we’ve done, when their curiosity is piqued, that’s when I know we’ve achieved something.”