Last year New Yorkers bid adieu to Philippe Starck’s Royalton presence, the former enfant terrible’s glass sconces shaped like ram’s horns, glitzy champagne bar that evoked the inside of a genie bottle, and three-legged chairs. And with that, flash was eclipsed by comfort, fantasy replaced with substance. But while New York only just stopped and smelled the classic design flowers — having allowed Philippe Starck to single-handedly razzle and dazzle the city for nearly 20 years — the British and Irish have always been weary of modernism, newfangled ‘starchitects’, and pop-star designers, and generally agree on the value of timeless, well-designed spaces.
     Case in point, my admiration and appreciation for this level of British (and Irish) design was only accentuated when on a recent visit to the newest refurb (as of April) of the Doyle Collection hotel group (formerly the Jurys Doyle Group) in London, The Kensington Hotel. Designed by Denis Looby from Dublin-based Sheehan & Barry Architects, its understated elegance — an eclectic mix of eastern antiques and vintage and repro Victorian furniture, vintage chandeliers and console tables, gorgeous Farrow & Ball wallpaper paints and Murano glass wall fittings — that makes you feel as if you’re a guest at a relative’s old Georgian home (i.e. a posh, long lost British uncle you just found).

Holey T Collar Skirt Hires bodkinbrooklyn.com Images courtesy of Bodkin

Eviana Hartman, whose switch from fashion writer to fashion designer has resulted in this year’s most promising eco-chic line, Bodkin, prefers to be the observer and not the observed. But in the months since she won the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation’s inaugural Sustainable Design award for Bodkin, it’s hard for her not to get noticed. The former fashion features editor at Nylon and fashion writer at Vogue and TeenVogue was used to searching out talent but secretly she also hoped to be the one creating. “I always thought that I wanted to design something,” says Hartman, “but it never occurred to me that I ever would.”