‘At long last, mathematicians have found a shape with a pattern that never repeats’! So ran the headline of a 2023 article in Smithsonian Magazine. Referencing rug patterns, the story described the discovery by mathematicians of the elusive ‘einstein tile’ – a tricky 13-sided shape that forms an infinitely non-repeating pattern. Well, if only one such mathematician had stumbled in (or out) of Annabel’s nightclub in the mid-2000s. There, our wide-eyed Pythagoras might have, with a quick calculation, seen something akin to the golden sequence between revellers’ golden sequins: Christine Van Der Hurd’s psychedelic rug, all surreal tendrils and blooms, swathing the expansive floors in a feat of aperiodic tiling. True, this wasn’t quite the polyhedroid the mathematicians were looking for, but the bespoke floor covering was nonetheless a singular achievement of design.
At the time, Annabel’s (WoI June 2018)– the notorious, paparazzi-ejecting private members’ hangout at 44 Berkeley Square, Mayfair – was undergoing one of several Madonna-like reinventions. The club was judiciously nipped and tucked under the shrewd eye of interiors maestro Adam Bray, who would later refresh the Vogue House lobby in the late 2010s, and the auspices of India Jane Birley, daughter of Annabel’s founder Mark. One major intervention was the removal of the existing floor covering, which may have once been tartan but equally might have sported some sort of much-stomped geometry. ‘The carpet was pre-smoking ban, and you know, smelt like the 1980s and was a bit sticky,’ says Bray, adding somewhat sardonically, ‘nightclubs always smell amazing, but this had the particular smell of Château Pétrus, Marlboro Lights, prawn cocktail and… well… anything else you might imagine.’
The idea for the new rug was based on one of India Jane’s watercolours – her grandfather was a society painter, but India took a more impressionistic approach – and textile designer Christine Van Der Hurd was appointed to translate this across the club’s multiple rooms. ‘She’s tremendously imaginative,’ says Bray of Vanderhurd. ‘I loved the level of detail in her designs, and we wanted something with a really high level of quality.’
The ‘organic fantasy’ of flowers, plants, snakes and butterflies – a pattern pulled as if from a Bosch panel – was first transformed by Van Der Hurd into gouache paintings, primed for colour pairing. Full-scale renderings of the club’s interiors, produced by Van Der Hurd’s computer-savvy son Jasper, were then transformed into nakshas (loom drawings) in Nepal, where the manufacturing – a feat of translational design – took place over six months, supervised by Van Der Hurd. Once installed, the swish rug, in millennial shades of fuchsia, violet, aquamarine and orange, added contemporary complexity to wood-panelled walls lined with society oil paintings – a veritable garden beneath the vaulted ceilings that emphasised the earthly delights available at Annabel’s.
The result of the revamp was something like New York super-club the Palladium in miniature: mirrors, a monumental buddha, and that psychedelic rug. And perhaps this comes as no surprise. New York had been Van Der Hurd’s stomping ground in the city’s 1980s heyday. She’d designed for brands like Biba, YSL and Liberty, and had created floor coverings for Henri Bendell’s 79,000 square foot flagship store on Fifth Avenue in the early 1990s. Her ascension, from painting textile patterns in her teenage bedroom on Portobello Road, to rubbing shoulders with Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Quentin Crisp, Annie Leibovitz, and flamboyant decorator Robert Metzger, had sprung from single-mindedly pursuing what she believed in.
Having fled a ‘lonely’ life married to a farmer in the English countryside, Van Der Hurd made her name in New York. The Bendell’s commission ‘launched me on a career of creating a lot more commercial carpets, which I did for the Federal Reserve Bank, New York University, Bergdorf Goodman,’ says Christine. ‘It was a departure, and I think that gave me the confidence that I could just go anywhere.’ Conversely, with design she creates without a preconceived idea of where she’s going. ‘I am followed by the emotion of designing. Obviously, if I’m doing a stripe collection, it’s going to be stripes, but it’s the building of the lines, it’s the building of the colour, it’s the colours working against each other. And that goes for everything.’
Van Der Hurd now works from the home she grew up in on Portobello Road – since converted into a showroom. Here, you’ll find examples of her current projects, along with boxes and boxes of archival paintings and plans, including those for the Annabel’s commission. Alas, the rug didn’t survive the club’s move in 2018. Though, as Bray says: ‘The thing is, in a nightclub, stuff has a very short lifespan.’ The same cannot be said of Van Der Hurd’s practice. ‘I don’t know what retiring is,’ she says. ‘That’s just not on the agenda. The idea of going and sitting in a chair or on a beach for the rest of my life just isn’t possible. I need to be involved.’ This attitude has been the pattern of her working life, underpinned by a fundamental equation: ‘Colour is essential for me. It’s really the most important thing in my world of design. It’s about the relationships of colours and never doing something that’s expected.’ As such, like the one-off floor covering in Annabel’s, Van Der Hurd’s designs are typically non-repeatable.
Christine Van Der Hurd. Visit vanderhurd.com
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