Woman of influence

It's 16 years since Ilse Crawford blew the cobwebs out of British interiors with Elle Decoration. Now she's putting her golden touch on anything from hotels to furniture. Fiona Rattray meets the tastemaker.

Philippe Starck is sitting astride a sun lounger on a New York rooftop, tucking into a burger. It's not every day you see a world-famous designer in their T-shirt and shorts, but that's not what has me spluttering into my cocktail on this fair spring evening. No, it's the question, hanging in the air among all who've recognised him, that having designed both the Royalton and Hudson hotels in this city, why on earth is he staying in this one? Maybe, like millions of other people around the world, he saw Soho House's famous rooftop pool bar on that episode of Sex and the City, and thought: 'I want some of that.' Maybe it has something to do with busmen and holidays. Or maybe, just maybe, he prefers the style of this one to his own.

Soho House New York - the first US outpost of the London members club - opened in the city's then up-and-coming, now totally there meatpacking district in spring 2003 and was an instant hit. Its British designer, Ilse Crawford, had never designed a hotel interior before, but that didn't seem to matter. Out went the identikit bedrooms and uniform beige. In came giant French-style fancy beds and groovy vintage furniture. Down went the lights in the corridors to a sultry gloom, into the gargantuan bedrooms went the feature bathtubs. New York is famous for its pokey hotel rooms. Soho House said: 'Stuff that, let's party.'

The evening after the Starck sighting, I'm back at Soho House for Ilse Crawford's salon party. Half-an-hour ago her hotel room was a mass of shoes, suitcases, clothes and make-up bags (she's sharing the room with colleagues from her London design studio Studioilse). Now it's immaculate. Bottles of chilled rosé are on ice (the hotel's atypical staff - warm, friendly, so not New York - have been busy) and the room is filling up fast.

Crawford is in town for the New York launch of her latest venture, a range of mirrored furniture for Italian company Baleri. It is on show at the ICFF furniture fair, uptown, where she has spent the day tottering expertly on a pair of electric-blue heels by Sergio Rossi, teamed with an acid-yellow silk skirt suit by Jasper Conran. Tonight she's wearing a slinky Missoni trouser suit; in both outfits she looks incredible, a statuesque, unconventional beauty. Until I interviewed her I confess I thought her a bit scary. Perhaps it's because when I first started out in this business, Crawford was the high-powered, glamorous editor of Elle Decoration. Or maybe it's because back in 1998 she surprised everyone in the design industry by leaving that job to head for even scarier, even more glamorous New York to become Vice President Home Product at Donna Karan. ← We didn't know it then, but that was simply the first of several reinventions that have made her seem more enigmatic, while enabling her to scatter her seed of influence ever further afield.

At Elle Deco, which she launched in 1989, she taught the British to love modern. She followed her successful stint at Donna Karan (where, despite the head-turning quarter-of-a-million-dollar salary, she decided she was 'not a corporate creature') by becoming head of department at the Eindhoven Design Academy in Holland (regarded by many as the best design school in the world), a post she still holds, and the launch of Bare magazine, a stylish but short-lived ode to well-being. At some point in the middle of all that she started her own design studio and consultancy, working for, among others, Swarovski and Waterford Crystal.

But Crawford is nothing if not a multi-tasker, so she has taken this trip to New York as the opportunity to launch her second book, Home Is Where The Heart Is (published by Rizzoli in September), the follow-up to 1997's The Sensual Home and written, I'm somewhat relieved to hear, holed up in bed after she crumbled under the pressure of yet another deadline. As we speak, even more furniture and lighting she designed - the curvy 36-24-36 range for British company Ferrious - is making a star appearance in the window of the Terence Conran Shop New York, at a show of recent British design curated by Max Fraser. On her stand at ICFF she's also showing a rug and matching linen fabric she designed for Christopher Farr. Tonight, though, is an informal affair; old friends - among them Museum of Modern Art design curator Paola Antonelli and US Vogue's Eve MacSweeney - join hot young British designers Barber Osgerby and Georg Baldele, Stella McCartney's husband Alasdhair Willis and Federico Carandini, creative director of Baleri Italia.

Is she, I wonder, aware that some people in the design community are a bit sniffy about her decision to turn her hand to furniture design? 'I'm slightly aware of that,' she says, 'but you just have to ignore it.' Besides, she adds, the reason she came up with this stuff is because there was a gap in the market. She couldn't find the kind of warm-but-modern furniture she wanted for her interiors, so she and her team did it themselves. The patterned, mirrored chest-of-drawers for Baleri was designed using a paper life-size model - that way they could adjust the height to allow for real-life needs like being able to lean on it, or put a drink down while standing. 'Storage is something we all need, but we had to think of a way to make that storage earn its keep.'

Crawford's decorative furniture may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's going down a storm with the Americans. 'How much for the whole lot?' wonders one expensive-looking couple. Even better, Murray Moss, owner of New York's premium-grade design store, wants to stock it. 'I quite fancy this shop-keeping lark,' the designer smiles.

Ilse Crawford was born in London in 1962. Her Danish mother, Jill Rendall, was an artist and pianist, her father Malcolm Crawford the economics editor at the Sunday Times. The family lived in Notting Hill, near Portobello Road, then a far cry from the spoilt-rotten neighbourhood it is now. Crawford went to state schools where she learned 'how to fight and do headstands'. At seven she gained triplet sisters to go with her younger brother. The strain on her mother was enormous, and Ilse went to stay with her grandparents. Eventually the family moved to Crookham Hill in Kent - to a big old ruin of an ex-vicarage that Ilse's mother camped out on the doorstep of the Bishop of Rochester to secure. Later, talking about the inspiration behind Soho House, she will recall the fun of growing up in a great rambling house: 'I remember when there were loads of us all squished into the same bed, or when friends came round because they didn't like staying in their own houses because they liked ours better.' Her mother was the kind of person who would spend all the housekeeping on an Elizabethan chest; her father, quite clearly, wasn't. She is, you suspect, a mixture of the two. The first thing she saved up for and bought with her own money was a lampshade from Biba - Barbara Hulanicki's zeitgeist-defining Kensington store of the Sixties and Seventies. 'I loved Biba,' she says - but still, not clothes or a chemistry set? 'It wasn't just a lampshade,' she says, fixing me with a meaningful look that suggests the determined ← child she must have been.

At 11 she won a place at a girl's grammar school in Tunbridge Wells. It was too far to travel every day, so she moved into a B&B. In the library, after school, she did her homework and read Vogue. After a few years she moved in with a schoolfriend. At 18 she was all set to go to York University, but then her mother died after a long illness, so she diverted to Bedford College (now Royal Holloway) in London to read history. She was needed at home to help with her siblings. It must have been a very unhappy time. 'Yes, but hanging out in cancer wards you meet people who are so funny and full of life, it's hard to be a depressed teenager. It just makes you get on with it.'

Get on with it is what she did. First she went to work in the offices of an architecture firm, next she got a job as a sub-editor at the Architect's Journal, followed by World of Interiors, from where because, she says, she was 'young and cheap' she went to be the launch editor of Elle Decoration. Nowadays, when the world is awash with glossy interiors magazines, design-fetish stores and adoring TV programmes, it's hard to appreciate the impact, but flicking through the dozen or so copies I've kept from the early Nineties, I well remember the influence it had on me. Alive with the bright young things of the UK design world - Tom Dixon, Nigel Coates, Neisha Crossland - it also had a gloriously global sweep (an at-home-with-his-pink-walls in Mexico Luis Barragan, for example) - and witty irreverence (Barbara Cartland made an appearance in one issue).

Crawford made it look easy, but clearly it wasn't. For one thing, the staff on Elle Deco's French parent magazine had a lot of control: 'I'd have to take all the transparencies to Paris, and these women who were in their fifties and sixties would lay them all out on the table and say: "This is good taste, that is bad taste." I was the black sheep.' On the other hand, she found she had few allies in the 'blokey' design world, where the trade publications were 'full of red-leather sofas'. 'They hated it,' she says. She had a different problem with the interiors photographers, who were used to sweeping away all evidence of human life for their immaculate compositions. Crawford wanted them to keep the clutter because 'that's how it looks nicest'. Worse, she wanted people in the pictures - 'that whole blurry-model thing', as she calls it. 'I was obsessed with the idea that it had to be relevant to people's lives and "alive", essentially - it couldn't just be about shopping.'

This tender appreciation for how people live - and the aspirational desire to show them how they might live better - is evident in Home Is Where The Heart Is. It's full of close-up pictures of busy shelves and hand-patched bedspreads and, of course, utterly gorgeous rooms. Most of them are owned by Crawford's friends and the designers she's worked with: Gijs and Aldo Bakker, the trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien, Tord Boontje (whose now-stellar international career she helped launch). Boontje was a little-known London-based Dutch designer when she invited him to design a chandelier for the supremely naff Austrian crystal company Swarovski. Crawford had been charged with revitalising the company's image, so for the Crystal Palace design project she handed over boxes of raw crystals to contemporary designers to play with. The results were shown in an ex-industrial space at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2002 to great acclaim, with Boontje's twinkling bough-like Blossom chandelier becoming an instant icon.

Home Is Where The Heart Is is full of tips on everything from in-floor heating to where in the world to buy the best bread. Crawford's home, a compact loft in London's Borough designed by the Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen, also features. It's a carefully planned space, and not at all poncy (the rough-tilework sinks in the kitchen and bathroom remind me of holidays in hot countries). She shares it with her Colombian husband, Oscar Pena Angarita, a fellow department head at Eindhoven, who even before they'd met recommended her for the job. Their long-distance courtship (she lived in New York, he was in in Milan) was a long one. 'He wasn't my type,' says Crawford. The turning point came when he met her at the airport after a long flight, armed with wine and salami. They revel in their differences. He likes happy music, she likes sad. She enjoys a Tarkovsky season at the NFT, he prefers 'toga movies'.

They live busy, far-flung lives. Crawford has several new projects for Soho House in the pipeline (in London's East End, but also in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Miami). She's just finished the Soho offices for commercials-production company Gorgeous. Not everything Crawford touches turns to gold, however. In 2003 she was recruited by Vittorio Radice - then, thanks to his success at Selfridges, the golden boy of British retailing - to help him with his mission to reshape the stuffy homewares department at Marks and Spencer. Crawford was creative director for the flagship Lifestore in Gateshead. To her credit, the store was beautifully styled, but before they could roll out the brand to the rest of the country, the new M&S management lost faith in the contemporary-furniture market. Radice was out (he now runs Italian department-store chain Rinascente) and the doors to the store were embarrassingly and hastily closed.

Crawford believes Radice was a victim of politics, and disputes the suggestion that M&S should never have put its faith in an elite team of people - among them Tyler Brûlé - who probably rarely shopped in its stores. 'There's something rather wrong about saying there's a typical M&S customer,' she says (and while we're at it, she doesn't like the 'cool' word either). She points out the success that M&S had with the range of lingerie designed by luxury brand Agent Provocateur. 'Consumers,' she says, 'are a lot more up for things that are "out there" than you think'.

Ilse Crawford didn't get where she is today without believing, and proving, that very strongly.


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