For many Londoners, living in one of the Barbican’s brutalist flats is bucket-list material. But a new collaboration between homewares and furniture brand Made and the legendary estate is making it a little easier to bring the Barbican’s hallmark geometric shapes and sculptural lines into your own home. The 23-piece collection includes furniture, lighting, textiles and accessories, and starts at £32 for a framed work of embroidered wall art.
The design process was spearheaded by Made’s head of design Beatriz Nuno, who says the Barbican and Made align on their belief that the best design “should be both functional and beautiful”. Nuno and the Made team dug through the Barbican’s archives to “understand not just the history of the building, but the thought process behind its construction, architecture and interiors,” she tells Broadsheet. “It was important to us that the collection was informed by the Barbican’s original vision, rather than simply referencing its aesthetic.”
A key find was the contribution of Miriam Howitt, who designed the interiors of the original show flats in the late 1960s. Howitt invented imaginary residents for each flat, building out who they were and how they would live in their space. “It’s a very human approach to design, and one that felt very familiar to us at Made,” Nuno says. “We used the open-plan living and dining space of one of Miriam’s apartments as the starting point for the collection, which is why the range focuses exclusively on those two rooms.”
The boldly coloured and patterned carpets Howitt used in her show flats directly inspired the Brute rug, which simplifies the geometric patterns of the original carpets and reinterprets the high-contrast palette with hand-tufted New Zealand wool in burgundy and cream with a very mid-century-coded deep shag pile.
Much of the collection takes design cues from the Barbican’s architecture and design language – and the inspiration behind several of the pieces will be instantly recognisable to regular visitors. The Plinth coffee table is inspired by the circular sunken seating pods in the Barbican’s lake. It comprises two separate semi-circular tables made from oak and oak veneer, with pale blue glossy tops; they can be joined together into one circular table or used separately, “making it as adaptable as it is sculptural”, Nuno says. The shape of the Curve table lamps references the tubular acoustic panels in the Barbican’s Concert Hall. “They’re playful yet architectural, striking the balance between a statement piece and an everyday object,” Nuno says. They’re an accessible £50 and come in three colourways: dusty blue, olive green and burgundy.
Other pieces adapt references from the Barbican archive. “The Tier collection, for example, draws on a 1966 architectural illustration of a terrace block elevation,” Nuno says. “We’ve translated those bold geometric forms across a hand-tufted rug, crewel-embroidered cushion and tufted framed wall art, bringing an archival detail into a new setting.”
Nuno says the Made team originally approached the Barbian out of a desire to delve into the creative way of living the Barbican offered, as well as its status as an icon of brutalism, but during the research and design process, “the more obvious it became that we were a natural fit. We both champion bold, uncompromising design and speak to a culturally engaged, design-conscious audience.”
The Made x Barbican collection is available now from Made and Next online, as well as the Barbican Shop, which is stocking selected items.
