House style

Designers celebrate strange creatures and Greek mythology in collections that are macabre and beautiful

This season’s homewares feature creatures

EMMA J SHIPLEY, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, started out designing scarves, launching her label at London Fashion Week in 2012, and making a name for her imaginative designs incorporating hybrid creatures such as leopard-spotted horses and winged elephants. She has since branched out into homeware with cushions, trays and place mats, and her latest collection, Animalia, sees her brightly coloured signature designs printed on to fabrics and wallpapers. A furniture collection that uses Shipley’s designs on period-style armchairs and chaises, produced in collaboration with the British fabric house Clarke & Clarke, is available exclusively in-store at Harrods.

Taking a slightly darker but no less fantastical tone is the New Zealand-born interior designer Christopher Hall, who set up shop in London earlier this year to launch his first furniture collection, Somata.

Hall is a designer who isn’t afraid of the macabre – he confesses to having carried a dead mouse around in a matchbox for a pet as a child – but the snakes, bats and other creatures that feature in his furniture designs look classical and elegant, rather than overly gothic. The bats on his Minyades stool (named after sisters in Greek mythology who were turned into bats) are almost cute, while the Pan tables, with their hoofed feet, have a touch of the Mr Tumnus about them. The star of the collection, however, is the Triton cabinet, with an oak frame inset with handmade glass ‘scales’ edged with copper foil – a tribute to the fishtailed Tritons who pulled Aphrodite’s carriage. emmajshipley.com

Right Furniture covered in fabric from Emma J Shipley’s Animalia collection, from £500 (harrods.com)