Getting to grips with an unfamiliar urban neighbourhood, like Max Radford was five years ago? Maybe you acclimatise quicker if you move into a former community hub. A pub, say. I am interviewing the gallerist and interior designer in what was for decades the saloon bar of the Prince Regent, a Walworth watering hole, but is now the home he rents with his wife, Emily Sanders, and their English bull terrier, Vincent. Because the room is still one big space, it’s all too easy to imagine old boys supping pints of mild round the fireplace, with its distinctive 1950s coffee-bean tiles, and bantering with ladies up at the bar (now kitchen area) as they order a pernod and black. Such daydreams can only keep conversation convivial.
‘I grew up in southwest London,’ says Max, ‘and I spent a lot of time avoiding Elephant & Castle – always going through to other places. So it was funny to come and live here.’ (The ugly traffic blackspot is half a mile away.) Despite his office and gallery being in Hackney, five years ago the duo decided to move here from the East End borough, because it was ‘the right sort of space’. His artist landlord had bought the pub in the 1990s, settled in upstairs, then set about converting this bit, the lounge bar and what was originally a service alley round the back into three separate flats.
The couple arrived at an opportune moment, just as the owner was planning another refurbishment. ‘We were allowed, very sweetly, to have some direction on what happened here.’ So Max and Emily persuaded him to keep the old pub ladies’ loo and washbasin, which were about to be ripped out to ‘make it appeal to professionals’. The landlord also let them replace the big wooden blinds in situ – ‘an oppressive banner of chunky timber’ – with gauzy bistro curtains that can be cleverly swung away from the windows on little arms to maximise light. Tempted to ‘wrap the kitchen in black and steel’, the new tenant realised ‘that was one step too far – you can’t take it with you!’ Similar considerations stopped him installing big wall lights by Bocci, a former collaborator. They would have required special drivers and significant tinkering with the electrics. Instead Max has suspended several of the Canadian manufacturer’s chunky hand-carved glass pendants, which hove into view like a flotilla of jellyfish.
Max studied at Falmouth Art College in Cornwall, and then spent what sounds like a formative experience working for the antique dealer/interior designer Max Rollitt in Hampshire. The graduate was kept busy drawing up reproduction furniture, adding bits of detail taken from his employer’s huge library of reference books. ‘He was a very good teacher in that he can explain things very well, and his love for early English and fine furniture was just so infectious. It inspired me to go off and find what I liked in design.’ With his son Ed Rollitt (who shot the pictures for this story), young Max would be involved in photographing little vignettes from the dealer’s stock, by pulling out plums from the showroom – a boon for the scenography involved in all aspects of his future career.
A stint working with the London-based decorator Hollie Bowden – her home will be featured in WoI’s February issue – brought him his own private clients and the opportunity to revamp a bar in Soho with friends. One thing led to another, and in 2021 he founded his eponymous studio, and has since completed several commercial, residential and set design projects. He has just finished fitting out a little shop for the jeweller Isabella Hewitt on Hackney’s ball-achingly hip Broadway Market, but he is proudest of the clinic he completed for the aesthetician Dr Karen Doherty in Shoreditch. The look is pure Max Radford, which he describes as ‘masc., harsh, dark colours, tone – I focus on the materiality and texture of things over, like, pattern or colour’. Inspired by Carlo Scarpa’s rationalist interiors of the 1970s, this moody and minimalist suite of rooms features a mix of great, sometimes unsung pieces from the 20th century – Philippe Malouin chairs, a Philippe Starck ‘Nina Freed’ table from 1983 – with contemporary works by a few of the nigh-on 50 designers that Max represents when wearing his other hat as a gallerist.
Some of these take a little bow in his flat. The Cologne-based Carsten in der Elst, who has supplied Max with a steady stream of stone chairs, contributed, gratis, one of his poly-fibre coffee tables, steel bolts erupting dramatically above the surface. Lewis Kemmenoe, a designer ‘going from strength to strength’, was unhappy with the production quality of a prototype wall lighting piece made from thin slices of burl wood, perspex and stainless steel that Max had exhibited. ‘“I’m gonna chuck it, mate, if you wanna keep it”’ – and there it is, hovering like a slice of lava lamp above a white vintage leather sofa in the corner.
But Max is also a keen student of modern design history, which accounts for the painting of a Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair snapped up from an East End second-hand shop. One of his most prized possessions, bought at auction, is a Pentagon Group steel cabinet by Wolfgang Laubersheimer from the 1980s, with a massive sandstone top carved out like that of a font. ‘You’re supposed to fill it with water and have lilies floating on it.’ The gallerist is clearly something of an autodidact and, inspired by the Rollitt library, he has steeped himself in 20th-century design; not via the internet, whose soul-destroying algorithms and repetitious carousel of images blot out rare niches, but by buying up coffee-table books and magazines from the 1980s and 1990s. ‘I am working my way through a stack of the Italian Abitare titles at the moment – it will never cease to be a really good publication for finding interesting stuff, and it has a strong international outlook.’
So in this repurposed space, the global is interacting with the local – by which, of course, I mean the local pub. Hidden behind a curtain, the kitchen’s back wall is still sheathed in wood-grained Formica, against which bottles of spirits were once fed upside down into their optics. A ‘Gentlemen’ sign on one door no longer ushers punters to the urinals, but the tenants to their tiny bedroom. And the window panes are etched with black eagles, the logo of the Truman brewery, which owned this old boozer for so many years. ‘For good and bad, it’s still a very working-class white neighbourhood – there’s still a lot of crime and drug-dealing going on, but there’s also a great community sense. I can walk out of the house and actually say hello to people. But there’s been a lot of change in just the last five years… So yes, there’s a good pie shop, but then there’s also an amazing Central and South American community, so you can go eat Colombian fried chicken or go to a ceviche restaurant – all within a mile.’
And with that, we call ‘time, gentlemen’. Knocking back a half of London tap, I thank my genial host for what you’d call a sensible midweek session.
For more information about Max Radford, visit maxradfordgallery.com
