Design Notes: Maria Speake

[gentle music]

I'm Maria Speake.

I helped start Retrouvius Design a long time ago

with my now husband, Adam Hills.

We started salvaging materials

in the process to help do up our first home.

It was the early 90s and skips were still out on the street,

and I mean, it was staggering.

Fireplaces, doors, incredible ironmongery,

it triggered a kind of shock

and appalling sense of waste.

So this enormous beautifully lit space

in effect was never used.

There was a kitchen down at the back

where the children's playroom now is,

and the most exciting thing was knowing that you come in

and this has to look, kind of, glamorous enough

that you don't feel like you are coming into

some backend bit of kitchen.

So the starting point was these two mahogany

display cabinets that had come from one of the great

British museum institutions that I'm not allowed to name.

[laughs]

We removed the panel and put in the glass

and, I mean, everything is made so beautifully that,

I mean, literally it just needed a little bit

of light sanding to bring it up,

and that all of the insides from the cabinet

is what has made these elements around here.

We knew we wanted something twinkly above

and that Adam had rescued these pieces of mirror

from Unilever building down on the Embankment,

and we made them into some very simple

kitchen cabinet doors.

I've gone back a lot to very nice, simple old pendants

because they're actually incredibly easy to change,

and on the whole are relatively inexpensive.

Apart from the fact that we had these wonderful

terrazzo column pieces which had originally been rescued

from Lewis's Department Store in Liverpool.

I mean, they're kind of modern, they're ancient.

One minute you're thinking about Athens

and The Parthenon and the next, I don't know

you're in some sort of deco art club or whatever.

Rather than recycling or allowing materials to go

through too many new processes

it is demystify ways in which materials can get reused.

These amazing old folio pieces that had originally come

from the British Library and they used to have all

of their drawings inside them, and somehow,

you know, that age, the texture,

the knowledge of what's been in there,

that's the fun of being able to design with salvaged

materials because you get a palette and a pattern

and a different movement that I wouldn't

ever have come up with.

These are Timorous Beasties,

who are great old friends from, in fact, our Glasgow days.

I very much like layering fabrics

in the way that you would with a dress.

I love the idea of giving a dandelion the, sort of,

scale and grandeur and, sort of, regal-ness.

It's so wonderful that it's just the weed

that is being made magical.

But then what was so marvelous was then

finding this original sweet little Scandinavian cross stitch

of the dandelion when you blow and you... [exhales]

These were originally the old wardrobes that were here

and so we just redid the doors on them

and helped break it up a bit,

and otherwise it was just reusing the doors

and, you know, painting them

and then putting a few little insets into them.

I'm unbelievably loyal to the wonderful Lewis & Wood

and this is one of their designs,

but I also like not using it constantly

over the whole repeat of the curtain,

I like breaking it up and picking up some of the colors

in with a velvet as well as with the ground cloth.

This is an old pair of Art Deco doors

and what we decided to do rather than reglaze was

mirror them on both sides so that at night,

when you are sleeping, these shut to block out the light

and also within the dressing room area

act as a relaxed simple mirror.

We have a very nice, simple bathroom

but then with these fragments of rescued fireplace pieces.

We used to have this term where it was

like materials were put in by stealth

so that no one would necessarily know

that they were reclaimed,

but I don't really mind how the materials get reused,

I just want them to get reused.

[relaxing music]