interview :: custhom

I first discovered Custhom’s work at Maison et Objet in Paris at the beginning of this year and was excited to discover they had created an entire range inspired by the Godfather of Dutch Design Wim Crouwel, of whom I am a huge fan. I went to visit Jemma in their studio in March and bumped into Jemma again, and met Nathan, during Clerkenwell Design Week, so I thought it was high time I interviewed them for the blog. We talked about the importance of good coffee, hand made, and staying inquisitive…

What’s the most important thing to know about you?

We try to push traditional processes to their limits. Whether it’s using embroidery on paper, or finding a new way to apply foils. We’ve pioneered the use of digital embroidery in wallpaper and we’re constantly experimenting to explore the process and create different effects. The quality of our work is paramount and we’re proud to support the heritage and craftsmanship of British manufacturing – all of our products are made exclusively in the UK.

How did Custhom come about?

It was quite amazing actually. The first time Nathan and I exhibited was at Tent in 2008, separately. Nathan was embroidering LEDs into paper and I was doing scratchable wallpapers and papers that didn’t repeat. We shared a stand, so we did a little bit in the middle under the name Custhom – because we were sharing the space and wanted to make it join up. It was just a fun side project. There were two pieces, both really geometric, one was grey and bright orangey-pink woven paper stitched together in a grid, and the other you could scratch off in certain parts to build up a pattern. And they got the most attention.

But we were in a relationship and didn’t think we ever wanted to work together, so we spent a year thinking ‘Do we do this, do we not do this? This could kill everything – arrghh what are we doing?!’ But we both wanted to work for ourselves, so eventually, we just thought ‘Let’s do it.’ We built a collection, hired a gallery on Redchurch Street, and held our first exhibition.

Your work is geeky and precise, but also experimental – where do those two quite different traits come from?

That pretty much summarises both of our personalities! We’d love to say it is something we have perfected over time, but those traits are inherent.

Why is it important to you to continue hand finishing many of your products?

Ever since studying at the RCA, we’ve both been really interested in exploiting the idea of uniqueness and individuality in a product that is partly manufactured using a mass production method. It’s important to us because it shows an element of personality and individuality that gets lost in a lot of what is produced today. We’re also showing that a product doesn’t need to scream ‘homemade craft’ to have been made by hand.

What influence does South East London have on your work?

Great coffee, interesting buildings and good road names.

What inspires you?

It varies quite a lot from science to architecture and nature, learning about new processes and materials. We’re lucky that we are two creative minds so we can always encourage each other’s ideas.

Tell me about the Wim Crouwel work you were commissioned to do for the Design Museum.

We met Alice Marsh from the Design Museum at that first exhibition. She said ‘I really love what you’re doing, I think it would be perfect for an exhibition we’ve got coming up, would you be interested?’ It was the retrospective of Wim Crouwel’s work and she just said, ‘What would you do?’ which was super-exciting. We loved the way Wim looked at typography and negative space. We loved the hint of metallic that’s in a lot of his work, the grid formation and the way he uses broken up images.

We didn’t want to copy his ideas, we wanted to take his way of thinking and reinterpret it in the way we naturally think, so we came up with two wallpapers, which allowed us to explore the processes we had been exploring, like the hand foiling with the use of repetition, but because the foils were added by hand you never get a really consistent finish, which we really liked. We also produced a range of stitched and drawn illustrations made on the embroidery machine. We programmed it as usual and then attached pens where the needles should be and made it just trace its steps and came up with this drawing style, which looks stitched, the detail is amazing and it still does these jump lines where the thread would be.

It was lovely because it was our first big commission – it allowed us to do things we hadn’t yet ventured into.

What was your design process?

We definitely knew we wanted to use embroidery because of that love of precision, but it’s quite a funny way we design together. We find it really hard to communicate verbally, so we tend to do our own interpretations of what the other one is thinking and then we just swap things backwards and forwards without really talking too much, so I might take something Nathan’s started and work on it a bit and then give it back to him to work on… sometimes it goes back and forth loads of times.

We did loads of research on Wim, on quite a visual level without reading too much. We were quite conscious that there would be so many fans of his that we didn’t wanted to be doing a bad version of what he does really really well. We went off on our own and drew little pictures and scribbles, trying to get this idea of negative space and precision and really fine detail and came up with quite a few patterns that we then started testing with to see which processes would work really well for it and then tested them onto papers and ceramics and sometimes drew straight onto things like porcelain and came up with it like that.

What’s your favourite part of the process?

Figuring out how to make a system or mechanism for each process is our favourite part, and then seeing the end result.

What are you most proud of?

Can you ask us again in a year?!

What advice would you give to an aspiring surface pattern designer?

To be inquisitive.

And finally, what’s your favourite colour?!

Jemma: English mustard yellow.
Nathan: Yves Klein Blue.

Jemma and Nathan have kindly shared this beautiful film with me, which documents their making process.

Further reading for the especially geeky:

• interview :: vera & kyte
• interview :: the future perfect
• interview :: timorous beasties
• interview :: resurface designs