Which is similar to your own way of life?
Yes.

How would you define that? Is it a search for natural beauty?
Yes, and allowing things to take their own shape.

Casa Vogue also seems to have an obsession with a certain Oscar Wildean type of upper class: with disgraced nobility. Some might even define it as morbid.
It’s because I believe it takes time to acquire taste. It doesn’t take money, thank God.

And when did you acquire taste?
I don’t know. If I think of my sister and how she has turned out today, maybe we’ve both had it since our childhood.

What was your parents’ house like?
At one point my father developed a love for everything ultramodern, for Swedish design. When we moved to Milan we lived in a skyscraper, which was considered strange at the time.

You came from Mantua, am I correct?
Yes, but we only lived there when we were young. We studied in Milan, and then I went to France and Carla moved to Turin. Until we both ended up back in Milan.

So when did you realise that your personal taste could become your job? Was working at Vogue something that you had planned, or was it just one of those things that happen in life?
I had no idea. I have a degree in literature, philosophy and Germanic philology. To be honest, I never thought I would even work at all. I never saw myself as a career girl.

Great! Finally somebody who dares to admit it. How did you see yourself?
I saw myself with children, playing golf…

Married?
Yes. I married when I was 20. I thought that was my life. Why do anything else?

It was your mother’s and your grandmothers’ life too.
My mother has so much energy even though she’s really old now. We went out for dinner recently and some men at the table next to us said, “How wonderful for your mother to go out at night.” They thought she was 82. But she’s 97! They couldn’t believe it. So then she stood up, leaning on her cane, and said, “I haven’t led a very tiring life.”

Ha ha!
It certainly helps your wellbeing.

So what happened?
I married when I was 20, and I got divorced after three months. I thought I needed to do something more intelligent.

I don’t want to get too personal, but a divorce after three months sounds like a big deal for somebody from a family such as yours, in Italy back then.
Are you kidding? Obviously I had the vows annulled by the Sacred Roman Rota.

Wow. Scandal.
Scandalissimo! But I knew it wasn’t the life I wanted. So I went for a job interview and they gave me the job. And from then on I started rising through the ranks. I worked at Vogue Bambini, I was editor of Lei when I was 29 and Per Lui when I was 31. I was quick.

Was it a very natural climb?
Well, I was also very lucky. You know, some people left at the right time. In life you have to be lucky. You can be a genius, but if you aren’t in the right place at the right time, genius is worthless. When Oliviero Toscani and Gisella Borioli left Vogue, I ended up there by myself, with just an assistant and the switchboard operator.

And then you messed up Vogue…
It was already a mess.

But you messed it up even more.
Well, I changed everything. They wanted Vogue to remain what it was: a trade-only magazine where everything was decided in a very structured way: one Krizia outfit, one Armani outfit, one Versace outfit, one Ferr é outfit. The making of my first cover is a fantastic story. We had to choose between a Valentino dress and a Lancetti dress. So Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino’s partner, said to me, “Please give it to the one that deserves it the most.” So I gave it to Yves Saint Laurent, ha ha! It was a riot!

Where you were a punk avant la lettre?
I love destroying things, breaking with the past.

You appointed Steven Meisel as the photographer to shoot all the Vogue covers. How long has he been doing that now?
It’s something like 22 years now, since I first discovered him. I felt like I had no other choice. Because you either force a magazine to get a very specific image, or you’ll never get one. You could maybe achieve it by using a group of photographers, but I chose to use just one. And I used models instead of actresses. It was around the start of the ‘supermodel’ era.

Where does your love for printed media come from?
For me it was all about photography.

It doesn’t come from a childhood passion for magazines.
Not at all. I used to consume fashion itself, not magazines. I was obsessed with Yves Saint Laurent.

And eventually you went on to – please excuse my language – bust some balls on the international market.
Don’t forget that I am working in Italian, a language that is only spoken in Italy. I mean, people don ’t even speak Italian in Brooklyn anymore. It’s only spoken here, which is a bit restricting. If you’re lucky enough to speak English, well, then you can communicate with the whole world, from China to India … I can only speak to Italians. That’s it. So the only way we could speak to everyone was through images, and that’s why I gave photography so much more space than words. Also, if you want an image that speaks to everyone, it has to be impossible to ignore. It has to be much, much more extreme than the normal boring images that everyone is used to. I think that’s what led to the explosion of Vogue Italia.

Did you ever feel like you were crashing a party where you weren’t exactly welcome?
You know what? It isn’t so much that I don’t care at all, but I really don’t care that much about other people’s opinions. Really. You can’t be loved by everyone. It’s impossible.

It must take a lot of courage.
Of course. And I am sure I published a lot of ugly things, extreme things, or simply things that didn’t turn out well. But they always had an element of research, and courage. Even when the things we ran were so ugly I didn’t even like them myself, I still ran them. It was a way of saying: “Let’s try to move forward. It might not be right for now, but it might point us in the right direction.”

A lack of fear is something you appreciate in general, right?
Yes, absolutely. You should never be afraid of change, of going too far, of facing things. There are two things I never lose: I never lose my courage, and I never lose sleep. Even in the most hectic moments of my life I try sleep twelve hours per day.

Twelve hours? Always?
Well, at least nine hours. And sometimes I manage to sleep twelve hours. Obviously I live a very balanced life.

Do you ever get mad at people?
Yes. But only for a second and it’s never personal. But I always have the courage to get mad. I have terrible fights with the photographers I work with.

Like?
“You will never work with me again!” – “No, you will never work with me again!”

So could we say that the best thing that ever happened to you was your marriage that ended after three months?
Absolutely.

Do you ever hear from him?
No. I never saw him again.

Text by Carlo Antonelli
Portrait by The Sartorialist
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Valeria lives alongside her art with her husband Gregorio and their three children, a boy of ten and boy-girl twins of seven. Fitting in with the rhythms of family life, she keeps her collection moving around her. “I like to change things organically, rehanging pieces here and there every month or two. It shifts the whole perspective, keeps it fluid and dynamic, and I like that,” she says. The children “don’t have a say”, but “they always have a comment. Sometimes they like it, sometimes they make fun, but that’s okay. Of course, boys that age can be really silly, so in front of the Lisa Yuskavage [a painting of a naked woman], they make jokes. But my only comment is:‘It’s art, and everything is possible.’ There is a Nicole Eisenman painting above the dining table that has been getting a lot of attention during our breakfasts. There is so much going on; the children find different things in it every day, and that’s really nice.”

From time to time she shuts the living- and dining-room doors on her children and their more rowdy friends, but in every other way, Valeria’s art and family coexist peacefully.

Making her first art purchases while living in New York in the mid 1990s at the start of her married life, Valeria immediately decided to concentrate on art by women. “It was not a strategy. I wasn’t thinking: ‘I want to have a collection about feminism.’ It was really just a feeling, an instinct. It was a moment when artists like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger were coming to the top, and that was exciting.” Among her significant early buys was a painting by the Egyptian-born artist Ghada Amer, whom she met soon after. “It was the beginning of a great relationship,” Valeria recalls. “My connection with Ghada taught me what kind of collector I would become.” The Ghada Amer work currently hangs above her dining-room fireplace.“It’s always out,” Valeria says. “There are some pieces that are always with me: the Ghada Amer, the Margherita Manzelli, the Lisa Yuskavage. I move them around, they change rooms, but they are always here.” Valeria’s collection is as much about gathering a group of objects as it is about making a connection. Valeria throws the warmest of art-world parties, at which she serves a legendary tiramisu.

Growing up in a town in Alto Milanese, Italy, Valeria and her twin sister, Stefania, who is now an accessories designer, developed their sense of style by ordering their outfits from a dressmaker from the age of eight. Their father was an entrepreneur who worked in plastics, and their mother was an extremely stylish homemaker. “My parents had a love of antiques, pieces from the Italian Renaissance. They weren’t connoisseurs in any sense, but they had a sense of beauty and proportion, a sense of aesthetics.” Valeria’s taste is decidedly different, though, and besides collecting contemporary art, she also has an interest in modern and contemporary design, with Achille Castiglioni lamps, Ettore Sottsass ceramics and Gaetano Pesce glassware taking pride of place alongside a pair of extraordinary fibreglass chairs by the designer Lloyd Schwan. “Choosing contemporary design is about finding my way in contemporary life,” she says. “I loved my parents’ collection, but I don’t want to lead their life, surrounded by things I don’t relate to.”

Text by Emily King
Photo by Marius Hansen
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Using her one-bedroom flat as a makeshift photography studio, Jen has a knack for creating small and simple tableaux that convey her relaxed and joyful approach to that first meal of the day, often creating her impromptu breakfast still lifes on a chair, the kitchen table, a windowsill, or even the floor. Over the years, she has amassed a collection of over a hundred different serviettes, coasters, plates, mugs, and vases. Yet her cosy kitchen, which she jokes takes up“over half” of her flat, manages to be surprisingly clutter-free.

So what exactly prompted her to start sharing her breakfast habits with the world in the first place?

“Being a professional food-and-interiors photographer, it just felt right starting off my day photographing something. I love cooking so it just kind of happened naturally.” What began as a hobby quickly turned into a blog sensation with an average of 30,000 weekly readers following Jen’s unabashed celebration of breakfast as a no-fuss morning indulgence rather than a necessary act of ingestion. If the comments on her blog are any indication, hers is a message that people are really taking to heart, with a certain VeggieGirl gushing over “a perfectly formed quiche”, or follower Jeanette who confesses that a picture of an omelette makes her “feel all cosy inside”. But for Jen the best comments or emails are those she receives from anorexic girls telling her that the photos on her blog have helped them see the value and beauty of food. Or those from new mothers who feel spurred on to take care of themselves by eating breakfast. “I never expected it would affect people in this way, but that is definitely something that makes it worthwhile,” says Jen, who admits that as a ‘southern’ girl who grew up with grits, biscuits, sausage and lots of eggs for breakfast, she is not exactly prone to counting calories. “But I am conscious of what is healthy,” she insists, “and I do try to buy mostly from the farmers’ market, or at least from grocery stores with local produce.”

So is there such a thing as breakfast etiquette for Jen, and in particular for any romantic pursuits who might find themselves waking up in her flat? “Not really,” she shrugs. “To each their own. Although if a guy considers a McMuffin or boxes of processed donuts valid breakfast options, then it’s probably not going to work out.”

Jen’s recipe for a quick spinach-and-mushroom frittata:
Sauté onions, garlic, mushrooms and spinach in a cast-iron skillet or pan suitable for the oven. Add two or three beaten eggs. Allow to set for about a minute. Sprinkle with your favourite type of cheese (for instance feta or cheddar). Place pan in pre-heated (400ºF or 200ºC) oven. Cook for about 10 minutes or until eggs are fully set and cheese has melted. Remove from oven and slide out onto a plate. Slice and enjoy.

Text by Felix Burrichter
Photo by Jen Causey
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Are you as interested in fashion as you are in interiors?
I like things. My whole thing is: I’m not interested in architecture; I’m interested in the spaces that people live in, and their stuff, and what that says about them. That’s why I’m usually not so much into very minimal interiors. If a space is completely empty, it doesn’t say much about the person living there. Or maybe it just says: “I have obsessive-compulsive disorder and anyone could live here.” I find that boring. There are exceptions, of course. I recently shot this cool dude who had a really interesting home because it was so neat. I’ve never seen anyone so neat before. In his closet he had two rows of shirts and each shirt was perfectly ironed and each hanger was exactly spaced evenly. His whole closet was like that. His whole house was like that. Amazing! It was awe-inspiring. Sometimes I’m struck by those kind of elements – not minimalistic per se, but more ‘ultra-organised’.

After photographing hundreds of interiors, do you recognise certain tendencies? Is someone’s interior the key to his soul?
I haven’t figured that out yet.

You don’t think that the homes of single people are essentially different from those of couples?
I don’t think you can generalise about that, really. And I don’t really even think about it, to be honest. I’m not a sociologist. I’m not like August Sander, trying to shoot a cross section of society. I photograph people that I happen to think are cool. But I try to avoid falling into some sort of stereotype or cliché – which gets harder and harder as time goes on. When I started The Selby, I was doing two, three posts per week, but now I’m only doing maybe one per week and I’m sometimes struggling to find good houses. I don’t want to repeat myself.

So in the end, all houses are the same?
Not that, but I do of course hang out with certain people. In New York or Paris or Tokyo I hang out with a certain crowd of creative people, people that I find interesting, whether they’re a chef or an architect or a designer. Lately I find myself shooting houses less and other spaces more. A while back I shot the chocolate factory of the Mast Brothers in Brooklyn, which I thought was so interesting. And I shot a restaurant that used to be an antique store before it evolved into this restaurant. I think that’s where the future for The Selby will lie.

Away from the home and into spaces in general?
Yeah. I also want to shoot the International Space Station.

That would be fabulous!
Wouldn’t that be amazing? I think I’d need to go via Russia now. The Americans don’t fly to the Space Station anymore.

Doesn’t Virgin arrange trips into space?
Yes. I’ve emailed Richard Branson about it. But I don’t think they go as far as the Space Station.

Where else would you love to shoot?
I want to do the White House. I’m working on it. I have a seven-year plan where I’m working on lots of different angles. My current angle is that I’m working on Bo the dog.

The Obama dog? That’s cute.
Yes. I’m trying through friends of friends.

Don’t you think the CIA will want to raid your computer and track your entire past before they’ll let you into the White House?
Perhaps. But I’m not giving up yet. Also I think it would be interesting to photograph the house of Bruce Weber, the photographer. Bruce went to the same school as I did.

Really?
We both went to the Hun School of Princeton, in New Jersey. I only found that out recently. I hated that school; it was a complete nightmare. It was so conservative, so preppy. You had all those sports classes, like wrestling and lacrosse. So I was reading an interview with Bruce and he was talking about how his school was a dreamtime for him, about how amazing Hun was and how great the wrestling and lacrosse classes were. It completely formed him. It was so funny, because for me that school was horrible, so to think that this photographer whom I respect so much was formed by the same experience…

Did you study photography?
No, I did Latin American studies and I worked for a senator in Mexico City for a while. I worked as a translator but I don’t speak Spanish, so I did a lot of freestyling. I am good at getting myself into situations all the time.

One of the fun things about The Selby is that you ask the people whose houses you photograph to fill in a questionnaire with things like “Can you redesign the flag of California for me and make a drawing here?” So I was wondering what you would do if you were asked to reinvent or redesign IKEA?
That’s interesting… I hear a lot of people talking about hacking IKEA: taking stuff from this huge monolith and then modifying it and changing it. I think it would be so much cooler if IKEA were encouraging that and did more open-ended things rather than just make these Snörty boards or what’s their name? It could be so much more creative. IKEA could be like Lego or Meccano, where there’s an object and you can make something out of it, just go for it. How cool would that be? They could even do collaborations with some great designers who would make some interesting half-products for people to take home to make something new.

Ultimately The Selby is about creativity, and how people decorate their homes and spaces with found objects like gas masks, duct tape, perfume bottles and other stuff… Do you think that is a generational thing? Our parents wouldn’t really hang a bike wheel on the wall for decoration, would they?
Well, it’s the ghost of Andy Warhol, right? We’re all just living in the shadow of Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp.

In a way your book and your website serve to glorify the collecting of clutter and junk. You’re showing the world the beauty of hoarding.
Well, minimalism is boring, isn’t it? Minimalism out, maximalism in!

But what attracts you to hoarding?
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t go for straight-up hoarders. It’s a trendy thing to have an interest in hoarders. There’s a TV show here in America about hoarders, like, people with real problems. It’s scary when they have rooms full of garbage. I don’t want to exploit people who have psychological problems.

You’ve never published photos of your own house, have you?
No.

Is it as cosy and messy as your studio?
Not at all. My girlfriend is very neat, so on the surface our house looks really clean and orderly. It’s not really what you would expect from me. And indeed as soon as you open a closet door, things fall on your head. I find new places to hide stuff all the time – under the bed or whatever. Instinctively I’m a bit of a hamster .

Text by Gert Jonkers
Portrait by Martien Mulder
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Now Martino finds himself moving between a trio of Hackney locations: the home he shares with Francis, his workshop, and his studio – all a few minutes by foot or bike from one another. He describes the studio as being for “thinking and drawing” although it also serves for doing his administration and – perhaps most importantly of all – for cooking. Martino frequently makes dinner for groups of friends here, and lunch is a daily ritual. On the afternoon I visit, Francis has just prepared a meal of lentils, cheese, speck and salad from their garden just over the road.

I’m curious to know how you find a vegetable patch in deepest Hackney, so we cross the street, walk through the entrance to the flats opposite and into a haven of wild strawberries and birdsong. A friend of the couple owns an apartment in the block and, patch by patch, the other residents have allowed Francis to cultivate a productive little paradise there.

Although these spaces are only temporary – the studio rented and perhaps soon to be sold by the landlord, and the garden secured only by good will – Martino and Francis make considerable effort to ensure that everything is just as they would like it to be. Contrary to the common financial philosophy that investments should be made only for the long term, the couple puts their energy into living in the moment. Like berries to be eaten in the sunshine, this strategy seems ripe with the possibility of karmic return (during our time in the garden, Martino arranges to fix an elderly neighbour’s fence). The present may only be fleeting, but that’s no reason to resist striving for perfection.

The pegboard on the east wall of Martino’s studio is a material expression of this approach. Concealing a layer of insulation that guards against next-door’s noise, it is an alternative to plasterboard that allows him “never to drill another hole”. Using a variety of hooks, many of them bought from Italian hardware shops during trips back to his South Tyrolean family home, Martino suspends a mixture of objects that range, broadly from left to right, from the practical to the decorative. Above the sink there is a collection of graters that reflects his particular obsession with the culinary virtues of ginger, and a battery of knives, which includes a Japanese soba knife and a small French blade designed for opening chestnuts. Further right there is an eccentric corkscrew made during a British Council workshop in India by craftsmen who had had no previous encounter with any such thing (it works, approximately, except that Martino drew the thread the wrong way round).

Martino’s talent for keeping things whimsical extends to his designs for furniture. The surface of the main studio table, for example, is an irregularly shaped wooden collage that suggests a maximum of 15 places, but is equally comfortable for much smaller groups: twos and threes can cluster cosily around its outcrops. His best-known project to date, 100 Chairs in 100 Days, was an improvisational marathon during which he constructed a range of seating possibilities from existing elements. The collective asymmetry of the resulting chairs generates a delightful mixture of colours and constructs, even though most are perfectly well balanced (admittedly, a few are a little more challenging than others). Of course, having a more conservative approach may be the safer option, but that’s never been Martino’s style. His life, like his work, is a celebration of the spontaneous.

Text by Emily King
Photo by Marius Hansen
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“It’s all the things you use to do something, to complete a task,” says Simon, who lives nearby. “We think that if you have a nice dustpan and brush, the sweeping up is perhaps a little bit more pleasurable than if you use some horrible plastic thing. And the look of an object can be very appealing as well. We get very excited by buckets and dustpans.”

“People may think we sell things that look old-fashioned, but we’ve never seen it like that,” says Rachel, who commutes to the store from her home in Hastings, a small seaside town that is a quiet alternative to its busy neighbour, Brighton. “We see these objects as timeless. You can put any of these things in a modern environment and they work equally well.”

“We all know about classic design furniture and all of that,” says Simon, referring to Eames, Aalto, Mies, etc. “But what we’re trying to do is to find everyday classics that don’t make so much noise. It might just be the glass that you have your water out of, or a little saucepan or something. We think it’s got the same merit, but in a much more humble way.”

Their store has changed remarkably little since they first opened in 2000. It has a fanatical following, including many, like me, with no instinct for cleaning. Labour and Wait offers a tightly edited array of products from a variety of sources that, when unpacked and put on the shelf, look so similar that some people think Labour and Wait is a brand in itself, remaking the past. Not so. “We hate that word ‘reproduction’,” says Simon. “This is stuff that has been made all along. It’s just that people have forgotten about it.”

Simon and Rachel are a benchmark example of what can be gained from taking a risk on a second act in life. They used to be menswear designers and met when they both got jobs at a British high-street brand. Mutual friends had already told them they had strikingly similar taste, and soon they also found they shared the same frustrations with their work. “We were bored with it,” says Simon, “and we both got talking about the things that we liked, things like string and wooden brushes, and independently we both fantasised about having a shop one day. We talked about it so much that in the end we just said,‘Let’s do it.’”

Nowadays, the store is a landmark stop-off point for hoards of weekend visitors who come to the re-energised Brick Lane area. The market itself is still ramshackle, with the stall nearest to Labour and Wait selling firelighters and cheap bin liners, but the streets are now filled with design stores and independent boutiques. When Labour and Wait opened, it was a barren district. “It was just storage units, a couple of junk shops,” says Simon.

Quite a few of the products that they sell today are the same as those they sold when they first opened. “About 20% we still stock and still sell as well as we did in the beginning,” says Rachel. “That’s also the beauty of what we’re doing and what attracted us to this kind of business. We wanted that consistency. We like the idea that you can buy this saucepan: you can buy it because you love it now, and in five years’ time you will still be able to buy it.”

There’s a lot about Labour and Wait that’s brutal. The products are tough, the owners’ editing is severe, and if either of them has any doubts about something new, they will walk away rather than risk diluting the brand. Comfort is rarely a priority. They do sell vintage Welsh blankets in often-garish colours, but these are of a wool so hardy that no moth has ever been able to gnaw a hole in them. Simon is proud of the fact that, unlike most homeware shops,“we do not sell cushions”. Yet they still manage to make the store feel personal, even entertaining, in the severity of the products and their juxtaposition on the shelf. It is also very fashionable. I popped into the Cheshire Street store one recent Sunday, and the majority of customers I saw were young, both male and female, and were cooing over scrubbing brushes and gardening tools as if they were iPhones, with Nick Drake singing away to himself on the shop stereo.

Labour and Wait also have a shop-in-shop on the top floor of Dover Street Market, the Comme des Garçons store in central London. They are next to Rose Bakery, and it was from there that I recently watched an American lady in a camel coat and a cable-knit jumper buy so much: it was like she was going to clear out the stand. Her haul included a traditional school satchel, two combs, three spotted handkerchiefs, some French buttons and a pack of scouring soap. We left the store at the same time, and at the lift I asked her about what she’d bought. “Souvenirs,” she said. “I just got everything from here. I’m done!”

Back in the Cheshire Street basement Rachel and Simon look eminently fashionable in their work jackets and Breton sweaters. Those are pieces that they have always stocked, and always wear: Rachel and Simon left the fashion industry that demanded continual change, to start a business where their relevancy comes from absolute consistency. “It always amuses us that people say, ‘You must be doing really well with those nautical stripes, because they’re really big this year’,” says Simon. “Well, they were really big last year too. These things are great every year.” Are there any items that haven’t worked in the store? “We both liked the idea of having tools,” says Rachel. “Things like hammers.” “So we had these fantastic wooden screwdrivers from Germany, they were so nice,” says Simon. “They didn ’t sell at all,” says Rachel. “And as soon as we stopped stocking them, people would come up and say, ‘Eh, you used to have those really nice screwdrivers…,’” says Simon.

As important to the pair as the things they choose to do is everything they choose not to do. If a certain product is particularly successful, they don’t attempt to capitalise on its success by stocking more of the same. It follows for their business too. Although their on-line store is thriving, and the Dover Street Market concession has been mirrored in Japan, there has been no expansion, and no sell-out. They wouldn’t mind slightly bigger premises though, with more space to be able to sell larger items. “We’re constrained by the size of the shop,” says Simon. “We can’t sell very many big things. We’ve got some ideas of things we’d like to do, but we’re not going to open some megastore. We’re quite conscious that people really like the scale of this shop.”

“And that we actually take time to wrap things properly,” says Rachel. “We’ve made lots of friends through the shop. We like that feel of being near a market and it being a social thing.” So the store reveals itself as a way of gaining satisfaction and pleasure through a steady, consistent working life. Indeed their store name speaks of such, taken from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life. “It’s about trying to get away from instant gratification,” says Simon. “Putting something in and having the patience to get something back.”

Rachel and Simon have urgent work to be getting on with: shifting boxes upstairs, fulfilling on-line orders. Both have their laptops perched precariously on piles on the desk that they share. “Because we kept the old shop front, some people read it as if it were a period store,” says Rachel. “But we’re not trying to live in the 1940s. It’s for today.”

Text by Charlie Porter
Photography by Marius Hansen
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Simon’s shed is a perfect 8x8ft square, constructed entirely of wood. Quaintly gabled and freshly painted, with an interior layered with the results of the car boot sale foraging that keeps its owner busy at weekends, it is part British beach hut, part Bedouin tent. Costing in the region of £1000, it came, he says, “with four not particularly hot men, but they got the thing erected.” Simon describes it as “a fairly recent purchase”, though some might question if something that happened ten years ago is recent.

For a decade, it has served as the perfect retreat, where he likes to drink a tart Sauvignon Blanc and listen to music. His iPod is banned on fashion shoots for its eerie lack of R & B and jolly pop, so the shed is where Simon goes to enjoy the contemplative sounds that he prefers, “from strange electronic to dirgy classical stuff”. He’s here to indulge in a love of being in his own private world.

This, it should be pointed out, is not the only shed in the garden. His partner, Donald, a tailor, put one up years ago. But while Donald’s is a place of diurnal industry, containing both his sewing machine and his overlocker, Simon’s is a place of nocturnal pleasure. Here, he sits at a mid-century roll-top desk on a kitchen chair painted in green gloss, kicking back, letting the world go by.

The floor is hidden beneath oriental rugs; tins of paint attest to his pursuit of DIY and badges cluster crazily on a pinboard. Last weekend Simon picked up a trompe l’oeil tea tray, decorated with kitsch mementoes of masculine life – pipes and cigarette packets. When guests come, they are offered the American-style rocking chair and quickly settle into the slower rhythm of shed life among its cushions and throws. “Yes, I do entertain. When friends come round, it’s where we go. And of course, if people make it as far as Ealing Broadway [a full 12 stops down the Central Line from Bond Street] I’ll always offer them a bowl of crisps.”

Text by Caroline Roux
Photo by Marius Hansen
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Ellie still isn’t used to being famous, despite the almost instant success her mélange of synth pop and folk has achieved. At the age of 23, Ellie Goulding has already effectively been anointed by the music industry as this year’s most promising pop star. She’s won both the BBC’s Sound of 2010 poll and the BRIT Awards’ Critics’ Choice. Her breakout single, Starry Eyed, obligingly went straight to number four.

In a short period of time, Ellie has learnt to be assertive and, professionally at least, tries to avoid fitting into someone else’s idea of what a young, female pop star ought to be. At the BRITs, she felt so dressed up – in hair extensions, “massive heels” and a scaly, green Burberry top – that she didn’t feel herself any more. Three months on, she says that she’s happy to go on television wearing the kind of stylish but unstyled clothes she has on today. And after the interview she does exactly that, when she’s off for a performance on TV.

She’s open and friendly, drinking green tea in the Universal Records café. She takes off her pink jumper to reveal a grey vest and impressively toned biceps, the results of being fanatically fit. “I can’t stand the thought of not being able to run away from something,” she explains with the paparazzi in mind. “We’re all supposed to be really fit and I hope to keep that up until the day I die.”

Ellie’s ideal regime is a punishing one, involving at least two hours per day in the gym. “I try and run about 10k, then I try to do a bit of the stepper – I love seeing sweat coming off my face. And then I do weights, but not to get big, just to be toned and to develop core strength. I stretch a lot, I do a lot of yoga stuff, sometimes skipping rope, and if I can find some gloves I’ll hit a punch bag.”

A keen reader, Ellie identified with Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, in which the author discusses the way physical exercise both clears his mind and fuels his writing. “It’s the one thing where I don’t have any dark thoughts. I don’t have any thoughts; I just run,” says Ellie. “It’s completely physical. There’s no psychology. ”

Five more books Ellie Goulding loves:

1. Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt
“The first book that ever made me cry.”
2. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
“It was the first book I read that was so passionate, and I guess it was quite graphic in a way. I was fascinated by the way he focused on things like blotches on the skin, and also I’m fascinated by war.”
3. Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami
“It makes death a beautiful thing, a part of life. I should have read it when I was a teenager; it would have helped me out.”
4. I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
“That was one of the first proper books I read. I just love the idea of living in a castle – it’s very romantic – with not much money, the fact that they made their own clothes.”
5. Fairy Tales – The Brothers Grimm
“Because it was my first taste of something dark.”

Ellie’s hero is Julia Davis, writer and star of the obscure, black TV comedy Nighty Night. She also loves the Australian TV show Summer Heights High, an often-cruel parody of high-school life. An early interest in Antonin Artaud, founder of the Theatre of Cruelty (“doing really insane, morbid things on stage in order for the audience to have catharsis”) inspired her to study drama at Kent University. Having grown up in Kington, a small village on the Welsh border, “I’d only been in things like a musical theatre group. There was nothing that satisfied my dark mind, I suppose. And the course at Kent focused on the avant-garde, performance art, where you’ve got people hanging from meat hooks and stuff, so that’s why I did it.”

So performance art’s loss was music’s gain?
“That’s true,” she says. “But also I could have been a fitness instructor. When I found a fascination with keeping fit, I took a lot of the courses that were really physical-theatre-based, where basically I got to run around all the time. I realised I was becoming more fascinated with my body than with theatre. And obviously music was slowly seeping in and someone had told me that I was really great, so I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll start doing gigs.’” Those gigs rapidly led to Ellie meeting her manager, collaborating with producers Frankmusik and Starsmith, and ultimately leaving university two years into the course to concentrate on music. In March, 2010, her debut album went straight to number one.

Yet, despite all the early acclaim, she didn’t expect her album to do well. Ellie says she frequently has “dark thoughts” and, startlingly, claims to dream about dying every single night. “Last night it was a plane crash,” Ellie says, eyes widening behind her blonde fringe. “The night before, I dreamt I was walking down a street in London and someone came up and attacked me.” She attributes the disturbing dreams in part to living in the capital. “If you’ve been brought up around clean air space, it has a massive effect to be suddenly surrounded by buildings. My body’s not built for the city.” She’d like to return to the countryside as soon as possible. “I want to buy a little house in Wales and just live there, go running and not hear anything except the sound of water and sheep.”

Ellie has started writing stuff for her second album and “it’s all very dark ”, she says. And in fact, despite its poppy nature, few of the lyrics in Ellie ’s existing material could be described as upbeat. Her debut single has the chorus “We’re under the sheets and you’re killing me.” Another song is a vivid portrait of feminine masochism and passivity: “Why don’t you be the artist/and make me out of clay? Why don’t you be the writer/and decide the words I say?”

“I wrote that when I was so sad a couple of years ago,” Ellie remembers, taking a sip of her tea. “I remember walking to the studio and being so upset about a stupid boy. I would have completely changed myself for him and in fact I think I did – I think I wore different things when I saw him, something that was a bit more revealing. In retrospect I think that’s a really awful way to be.”

But did it work?
“No.”

Five songs Ellie Goulding wishes she’d written:

1. Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen
“Although apparently it took ten years to write.”
2. Yesterday – The Beatles
“It’s the most universal song in the world.”
3. Roscoe – Midlake
“They write about things I can relate to because they write about the countryside a lot – they make it quite cool. They write as if we’re back in the Dark Ages. It’s the only cover I do live.”
4. Blue – Joni Mitchell
“There’s such perfection in the lyrics. It’s like I can sing it and sing it and never get bored.”
5. Hyperballad – Björk
“She imagines what her body would sound like slamming against the rocks - ‘When I land will my eyes be closed or open? -that’s something that I would think about. I was on the ferry the other day and I don’t know if this is something that happens to everyone, but when you’re at an edge you instantly want to fall off. I had to go in because I was almost drawn off.”

Text by Alex Needham
Photography by Andreas Larsson
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Even though the original car repair shop already closed its doors in 1999, occasional specks of oil-soiled paint on the wall still bear witness to the gallery’s previous life. “Instead of the typical gallery vitrine – all glass and white walls – I wanted something more intimate,” explains Jennifer, who opened the gallery in this semi-basement two years ago. This year, together with 24 other promising international galleries – Gaga from Mexico City, Rodeo from Istanbul, Platform China from Beijing, and Nanzuka Underground from Tokyo, among others– Chert has been selected to participate in the prestigious Frame programme, a showcase for young galleries that is part of the annual Frieze Art Fair in London.

That raises the question how such an unusual spatial experience like that of Chert will translate into the relative anonymity of an art fair stand.“We don’t have that much room to play with in a 25m2 booth,” says Jennifer, “but no matter which art fair we go to, I always take my desk with me, to provide a link to our Berlin space.” The desk, a simple rectangular wooden structure that Jennifer had manufactured by a local carpenter in Kreuzberg, contains a built-in compartment to hold all the gallery’s artists’ portfolios. Perhaps even more importantly, Chert asked the sculptor Heike Kabisch, who recently presented a site-specific solo installation at the Berlin gallery, to propose a similar scenario for the Frame booth, in which sculpture and surroundings form a whole. Promises Jennifer: “Just like earlier this year in Berlin, Heike’s presentation in London will be very strong and visual. We’re expecting strong reactions from the public.”

Frame, dedicated to solo art presentations by galleries that have been established in the last six years, is part of Frieze Art Fair, opening 14 October 2010 in Regent’s Park, London. Frame is sponsored by COS.

Text by Felix Burrichter
Photo by Marius Hansen
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