ADAM COURT
We chat to the maverick designer and OKHA director about his style inclinations
Having grown up in a village in the Midlands, England, on the boundary between the city and vast countryside, an early impulse to express himself creatively put him at a crossroads between becoming an actor or diving into the art and design world. He chose the latter. For the OKHA director and designer, “creating is exploration, expression, discovery, passion, love, meditation and salvation”. His designs for OKHA are conceptually strong, mining beneath the surface and speaking to a primal connection between form and function.
OKHA’s defining identity is …
Expressive modern elegance. To me, good design comes down to an emotional and psychological connection that endures. Good design must create a resonance and vibration; it must intrigue, provoke, mystify and sometimes disturb. In addition, it must excel at serving its function.
Some of the things that I relish in my home are …
my Bialetti coffee pot, Rega 3 Turntable, Bose noise cancelling headphones and Artemide Tizio lamp.
My most prized design pieces by me are …
the Toro chair, Repose Sofa and Tectra coffee table. And my Leica D Lux camera, which I don’t see any need to change. It’s small, beautiful and takes great pictures.
SA’s design offerings have ...
a beautifully naive gung-ho attitude. This is a positive thing. I use the word naive as a positive.
My taste in music is all encompassing.
I dart around musically like a jacked-up schizophrenic. Currently that’s Frank Ocean, Thom Yorke and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
I don’t have coffee-table books,
rather my books are scattered all over and I pick them up from room to room, read a few pages, scan a few images and put them down and pick up another. Kind of like picking grapes from a bowl of fruit.
My holiday requirements depend on what I’m craving and what I need.
Sri
Lanka remains a favourite for the warmth of its people, the varied landscapes, its lushness and exoticism, incredible cuisine, its temples and its sense of timelessness and calm.
My best hotel is Sri Lanke’s Galle Forte Hotel,
originally a Dutch colonial mansion in the old port town of Galle, now a gorgeous boutique hotel and the perfect place to drift away in aromatically infused dreams.
One of the best objects of design of all time is Dieter Rams’s 1978 Clock Radio for Braun.
His work literally changed the face and direction of design. Rams is a reductionist of perfection. His scale, use of symmetry and
asymmetry, his lean, stripped-back aesthetic that is still so damn sexy — his work exists outside of time and place.
The memorable architectural spaces I’ve loved include
the great Japanese architects whose work I saw there — Toyo Ito, Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma and Shigeru Ban. There’s a transcendental quality to their work that we in the West don’t seem to be able to touch. I also visited a Geoffrey Bawa house in Sri Lanka; it had such grace, calm and tranquillity. Bawa works like a poet with materials, nature and light much in the same way as the great Japanese architects.
I’m a fragrance junkie.
To me, a fragrance is dialogue, communication and connection at its most primal level. A favourite is Scent One, Hinoki by Comme des Garçons in collab with Monocle. It has an aroma of camphor, cypress, incense and an alluringly off-tinge of oil paint (turpentine). This scent takes me on travels in my mind.
Personal style means doing things your way,
following your gut, living your life on your terms. I can’t do style that’s overtly constructed; it has to come from within, your inner being must express itself through the outer shell in a fluid, unfiltered way.
I wouldn’t mind holing up in a dimly lit back-street bar with the likes of
David Lynch, Noomi Rapace, Chris Walken, Yohji Yamamoto, Catherine Deneuve, Johnny Depp and Michèle Lamy, Tilda Swinton, Benicio Del Toro, Keith Richards and Marlon Brando, among others. Quite a party, especially as some of them are dead.
The local interior designers I’m watching right now are
Tristan at Studio A, and the women at Studio 19, who are doing good things. Let’s see where they go, they should push things more.
My go-to wardrobe item is
a black leather motorcycle jacket. After everything else gets dusted, I’ll still have that.
www.okha.com
Your inner being must express itself through the outer shell in a fluid, unfiltered way