What do you do if you can't find that absolutely perfect piece of furniture to fit your room? Well, if you've got the budget, and British interior designers like Jo leGleud and Scott Maddux in your corner, then you commission it from scratch. The ability to go bespoke with any element of your home's furnishings — anything from a sofa down to a cabinet pull — isn't something that's in every interior designer's arsenal, but for the founders of Maddux Creative, it's something that's been part of their projects for a long time.
Now, the design studio has launched Maison by Maddux Creative, a platform which, for the first time, brings some of their bespoke pieces they've worked on over the past 14 years to a wider market. "When you install these pieces in a project, someone always inevitably says, 'This is beautiful, where can I buy one?'" Jo tells me over a Zoom call, sat among the team in her studio. "Now, we have that platform."
As someone who works in the design world, I'm acutely aware of how much great design is already out there — so, I wonder, what set of circumstances comes about that the design studio needs to turn to custom furniture design?
"Our projects often reference vintage and antique furniture, because we like adding that layer of patina and interest," Jo says, "and sometimes you find something and it's perfect, but it's not the right size. So we've always had this team of people that can help us fulfill those kinds of briefs."
"Sometimes, there are certain pieces where you just say, we're not going to find what we need," Jo admits. "The great thing is that it really does make you think about what the precise detailing needs to be." When you're building a design from scratch, there's no need for compromise.
Jo also loves the opportunity to do something "fantastical" through bespoke pieces as a personal collaboration with a client. "You're going on this journey with someone, and you get to know them, and their own obsessions, really well. What's in there, it's my job to bring it out, and that's what makes people's home really unique," the designer explains. "That's our ethos — to tune into what the character of a client, or family is, and work out: what do we want to do with that?"
"Obviously, this comes at a certain price point, and you have to have a client who's willing to go through the process and be totally on board with the whole idea, understanding why it's necessary," Jo adds.
Not all the pieces, however, are born out of a 'need', or as a reaction to a specific property that needs problem-solving. Some of the Maison by Maddux Creative pieces were realized through purer creative exploits. The fungi-like Curio hardware was born from a collaboration during Maddux Creative's 2023 turn at Design Centre Chelsea Harbour's WOW!house, in a fantastical space that was almost alive with pieces that felt like mycelium networks, and the ceiling like the gills of a mushroom.
The Shimmy Stool, another highlight of the first raft of Maison by Maddux Creative designs, was another that had a less conventional advent. "I did a collection of trimmings with Samuel and Son a few years ago, and we had the pleasure of working with Miranda Sinclair to do the styling on the shoot," Jo recounts. "We made this little stool for the shoot, and a client really liked it — developed it a little bit and made it more usable in her bathroom, where it takes center stage." What was meant to be a simple showcase for a trim took on a new life all of its own.
Of course, the task of creating bespoke furniture designs doesn't begin and end with the designers. It requires teams of craftspeople, in this case working across diverse mediums, to bring the imagined concepts to life.
Scott's background is in architecture, and Jo's is in textile design and embroidery, so both designers have a strong relationship with the process of how things are made, just from a very different point of view. "That's my favorite part of what we do, just be able to be really involved with the makers," Jo says. "That conversation of understanding how they're doing something and why they're doing it, getting into the mindset that makes you excited about designing something."
This, it's important to point out, is just the inaugural collection for Maison by Maddux Creative — a small curation of the designers' original designs that set the stage for what they aim to achieve with the platform. Jo describes Maison as having a "natural life", made up of further bespoke pieces from the studio's previous projects, alongside one-off vintage designs, and potentially even collaborations, bringing a spotlight to emerging designers.
"Whether it's our own designs, collaborations with brands such as Samuel and Sons, or ways that we'd work with new designers, it has to be that it could have only been created with us, that it has our voice in it."
