“It’s very romantic, a bit nostalgic, and very optimistic,” says Luke Edward Hall of his design aesthetic. In just a few short years, Hall—an artist, interior designer, and interiors columnist for the Financial Times—has made a serious name for himself, creating stationery for Papier; loafers for Stubbs & Wootton; cushions for Liberty London; a wine label for Berry Bros. & Rudd; plates for Le Sirenuse hotel, in Positano; a biscuit for the Royal Academy.... The list goes on.
Hall earned a degree in men’s-wear design from Central Saint Martins, in London, in 2012, and went on to intern at Dazed magazine while also working for a handful of well-known fashion and interior designers. He quickly fell in with a young, creative set, which included his now fiancé Duncan Campbell, co-founder of a London-based creative consultancy.
It might be surprising to know that behind the round tortoiseshell glasses and hushed tones, Hall—slight, with floppy hair and a reserved manner—could well be pinned up as the ultimate millennial artist. It was really through Instagram that his work took off, and he now has more than 90,000 followers. “That was how people got to know about my work,” says Hall. “I could draw things up on Instagram, and I could sell them straight away when people would message me.” Instagram was also where Hall got his first break, when the Parker, a vibrant Jonathan Adler–designed hotel in Palm Springs, asked Hall (by DM, of course) to create a series of drawings for an in-house book about the hotel.
Stationery for Papier; loafers for Stubbs & Hall; plates for Le Sirenuse hotel, in Positano.... The list goes on.
Merging old and new, Hall works with watercolors, acrylics, chalk, and oil pastels to create pieces that evoke classical history but are delivered with a contemporary bonheur. Pumped with color, Hall’s designs are playful, irreverent, and eternally recognizable—few others could pull off a tented room with lime-green floors, striped walls, and pendulous chandeliers, as he did in his commission at the Masterpiece London art fair last year.
This season sees the publication of Hall’s first collection, Greco Disco, by teNeues. The sumptuous coffee-table book includes, for the most part, “work from the last four years,” Hall says, but “I have also used a few bits from when I was really young and from university. It’s kind of a scrapbook, with lots of photographs, some travel writing, extracts from songs and my favorite books.” And, like Hall, what this book certainly isn’t is just one thing. —Bridget Arsenault