5 Minutes with Celebrity Designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen

Celebrity designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is designing an exclusive furniture collection for Courts

5 Minutes with Celebrity Designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen

The flamboyant Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is best known as the hard-edged judge on reality TV competition The Apartment. His passionate designs and flair for the dramatic have made Laurence a memorable and respected character in the interior design industry. Aside from his regular stint on our TV screens, the world-acclaimed designer has sealed a partnership with Courts. Laurence will launch his House of Laurence collection of accessories exclusively in Courts, come up with a new furniture range for the retailer, and will design a limited-edition furniture piece to commemorate SG50.

We speak to the prolific designer to find out about his partnership with Courts and his new collections.

Tell me about your exclusive furniture collection, the Laurence Collection for Courts.
Basically, you’ll be able to create your own living room, drawing room or sitting room. The sofas and chairs are the statement piece, and then the accessory collection allows you to bring an even stronger sense of personality to it. One of the big innovations I’ve been working on is the relationship between the sofas and things like the cushions. That personal selection of cushions means that your living room will be completely unlike anyone else’s. That’s really important to me as I want people to feel a very strong sense of specialness with how they use the products.

Laurence-Collection-For-Courts

How did you come up with this new collection of furniture?
The Laurence Collection for Courts is, for me, going to be very much about making a deliberately fashion-conscious style statement in the home, but in a very comfortable way. When designing furniture it’s important for me to ensure it is as comfortable as it looks, and that’s not something you always get. My collection for Courts is specifically designed to bring life, energy, interest and a bit of romance into the environment. When you get home, you need to be looked after, you need to be seduced and my furniture is going to do that.

House-of-Laurence_cushions

How about the House of Laurence range of home accessories?
The idea is to create retail experience at Courts, one which doesn’t exist in Singapore at the moment: customers can walk into a room and be able to see my brand in context. The House of Laurence accessories and Laurence Collection for Courts will be used to really tell an interior design story. I think this is one of the real growing areas in Singapore – interior design is the new rock ‘n roll! Employing an interior designer can be very expensive, so I’m now giving people the opportunity to create that interior design look at very accessible price points. I’m particularly excited for people to discover my home fragrances. There’s ‘Midnight Ballroom’ and ‘Royal Garden Party’, and they’re two different ways for making your room smell dense, opulent but very glamourous.

House-of-Laurence_Majesty-Heirloom-Frames

Give us a sneak preview of the limited-edition furniture piece that you’re designing for Courts to commemorate SG50.
It’s called the SG50 Cocktail Collection, and it comprises of a sofa and a chair. It’s a real statement of my design aesthetic and everything that I think is synonymous with the opulent glamour of Singapore’s 50 years. What I think works particularly well about it is that it takes a traditional upholstery form – which is the Lozenge buttoning of the Chesterfield – and applies it to a very streamlined, 20th century modern shape that brings it right up to date. Then we’ve got chrome splayed legs which, for me, are a real reference to that ‘city that never sleeps’ and ‘glamorous party city’ that people associate with Singapore. We’re doing it in a very rich purple, which I absolutely love, and I think is a great colour for Singapore. But we’re also doing it in a midnight black and ultimate opulent sable so people can mix and match.

The House of Laurence collection of accessories is exclusively available at Courts Singapore. The Laurence Collection for Courts will be released in May, and the SG50 Cocktail Collection will be available shortly after. 

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