It’s all in the details

by Kate Birch | August 1, 2010

Kate Birch speaks to design guru David Collins about his award-winning work, which has revolutionised the restaurant and hotel industry, and about his future foray into fashion

If you’ve ever ordered martinis in the famed Connaught Bar or sipped cocktails at celebrity hangout The Blue Bar at The Berkeley Hotel in London, you will have witnessed, and no doubt been moved by, the design genius that is David Collins.

The visionary behind such iconic and innovative properties, David is not a man who likes to stand still. He even goes so far as to admit that unless he comes up with something inspiring or creative every day, he doesn’t feel that he has achieved a day’s work.

“I reinvent myself because I am never really happy with what I have done, and I often feel that when I meet somebody new, I am being given an opportunity to do something I have not done before,” says the man behind the successful and innovative David Collins Studio, which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Though David is famed for his refined and innovative aesthetics within many leading hotels and restaurants, he is also passionate about communicating his design via other projects, including his latest ones in fashion.

These include a store with Laurence Graff of Graff Diamonds on Bond Street and a menswear boutique on the famous Via Montenapoleone in Milan for a member of the Marni family. Not just jobs for David, these projects clearly fill him with passion.

“I think that the people I meet help me reinvent myself, as well as the people I work with,” he says. David applies his reinvention principles to the process of design, too, likening it to fashion and politics in its constant evolution.

And it’s this process of personal and aesthetic reinvention that sums up the David Collins Studio – a one-stop-shop design service, where interior architecture, furniture, lighting and graphic design all interact to seamlessly produce a single strong vision.

“We like to reinvent ourselves and constantly search for new ways of doing things, improving what we have done before,” he reiterates.

It’s an approach that has led to the design studio’s international acclaim over the last 25 years. Beginning with small interior architectural jobs in the residential sector, the business has evolved to expansion within Europe, America and the Far East.