A most hospitable man: In conversation with Shayne Brady

This article first appeared in Mix Interiors #232

Words: Dominic Lutyens 

Co-founded by Shayne Brady and Emily Williams in 2013, Bloomsbury-based interior architecture and design studio BradyWilliams undertakes a mix of hospitality projects and upscale, mostly London-based residential ones. Colour photos of these, mounted on card, are arranged on shelves spanning an entire wall of the studio’s meeting room where Brady and I meet. This proves useful as the photos are easy to remove and look at whenever Brady zeroes in on a project in detail or mentions others in passing. Our wide-ranging conversation takes in his formative influences, his career to date and BradyWilliams’s hospitality projects in particular.

Brady talks at length about the studio’s project The Aubrey at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London. This is named after Aesthetic Movement artist Aubrey Beardsley and celebrates the movement’s love of Japonisme (a Western, 19^th-century craze for Japanese art and design), as well as Japan’s sake-fuelled, late-night izakaya bars. Brady also enthuses about the highly theatrical Bob Bob Ricard City on Leadenhall Street, London, where retro and futuristic Japanese references collide – the interiors nod to both the Orient Express and Japanese high-speed bullet trains.