After eight years working in a townhouse in London’s Shoreditch district, “the charm was becoming problematic,” says Faye Toogood of the small-roomed, narrow-vestibuled studio she shared with her team of 25. She craved more lateral space, light, and room for experimentation—and she found it in Camden, where “the heartbeat of Old London still exists,” says the multidisciplinary designer. I caught up with Toogood as she settled into the new digs to learn what a post-pandemic workspace looks like for her firm, as well as how a fresh footprint can enliven company culture and creativity.
Mel Studach: What advice would you give to 2008 Faye, just starting her studio?
Faye Toogood: Follow your independent thought processes, creativity, voice, vision—whatever the word you want to use. Right now, that’s actually the toughest thing to do because we’re bombarded. But being true to who you are without being too influenced by the noise is crucial to success. Also, being able to look back and think, Yeah, that was me. I did that, and that felt right and true, is so rewarding.
I hear you, social media is its own bubble. How do you stay engaged and inspired when tuning it out?
When I started [as the interiors editor] at The World of Interiors, you’d have to wait a month for a magazine to come out to know what was going on. You weren’t spending eight hours of your day scrolling, and you weren’t fully aware of what everybody else was doing, so it meant you had to get on with your own vision.
Clearly it’s a balance that we all are desperately trying to get because connecting to people is so important to growth, and without that connection, no one’s going to know about you and what you’re doing. But you have to do it in a way that doesn’t swing too far, which involves some discipline. A few times per year in the studio, we host days where we open up the studio and anyone can visit and see what we’re doing. It’s a small thing, but it’s a nod to the tangible being just as important as the virtual.
That leads me perfectly to your new studio in Camden. Office design has been put under a microscope since the pandemic. How does this new space reflect the way you work now?
[The pandemic] changed the way we work permanently. We encourage people to be together, not just from an attendance point of view but for our younger team members to learn. It’s not just about socially being with people; it’s about how to do business. How do you navigate an issue? How do you conduct a meeting? There’s only so much that you can do on a screen, and to lose that activity and that connection is a great shame. So we ask people to come in at a minimum of three days. We try to make it so that everybody is present on the days that make sense: We have design days, then business-critical and marketing days.