Aiveen’s art
TIMES change and we have no choice but to change with them. It’s especially true for a boutique design business for which recession has happily meant acquiring a new client base with commissions in Brazil, Russia and the Middle East.
When I first visited Cork-born upholsterer Aiveen Daly at her London atelier six years ago, business was growing steadily around her collection of immaculately hand-upholstered chairs for clients in Ireland and the UK.
“Recession almost eliminated that business overnight,” she tells me as we sipped tea in her white and airy showroom, sitting on her pink Love-Love sofa.
Then a commission from the Candy brothers for One Hyde Park opened up a new clientele and product direction.
“Our clients now are high end, Sunday Times Rich List names, who don’t want what anyone else wants,” she says. “One commissioned upholstered doors and bed head boards for their house on Ipanema beach in time for the World Cup.”
Aiveen smiles, maybe prompted by my wide-eyed look, and explains these jobs come through interior designers, so no jetting out to exotic climes for her.
“Actually it’s perfect for me as a working mother. I’m not the one getting calls from the client at midnight.”
It’s also a long way from her first New Year’s Eve in business when at midnight she was alone upholstering a chair for a Vogue photo shoot.
These new clients and their spending power have allowed Aiveen to work on originating new ideas, methods and applications. Who, for example, would have thought of upholstering a door? And there’s certainly a more architectural feel to her output which is made by her workshop crew just around the corner. “They’re proper craft makers, meticulous and precise,” she says, “which is essential for what we do.”
Like other design talent, high street retailers have approached her to design lines. “It’s never appealed,” she says, “We’re quite nimble so we have freedom to be creative and not tied into something for a year. The guys love the challenge of when a client asks to do something using precision instruments to get one tenth of a millimetre.”
So how does someone with such good taste furnish her own home? She reminds me that two daughters under four with jammy fingers don’t go with white satin upholstery, but she does have her lampshade prototypes and her first Miss Moneypenny chair. She also loves an Art Deco drinks’ cabinet she bought on eBay for £30.
My eyes drift around the showroom and rest on her Stiletto chair collection. What strikes me is their size and rich colour relative to the larger scale pieces she now produces with their couture finish and muted metallics stitched in geometric overlays.
I find myself asking, what did you want to be when you grew up? “I never knew at school,” she laughs. “There was no such thing as a decorative upholsterer. It’s a made up job.”
If she had to change though, she’d be a shoe and handbag designer, and from there the conversation turns to Lotto win fantasies. Aiveen’s is going to art college, and mine? The pink Love-Love sofa I’m sitting on.
Prices on application from www.aiveendaly.com
nNext week it’s black and white.
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