It’s all about beauty: In conversation with Martin Brudnizki

Words: Harry McKinley

This article first appeared in Mix Interiors #230

As usual, and slightly contrary to fashion, I’m early. It does, however, proffer the opportunity to sink into a yawning sofa and appraise the lobby of MBDS, Martin Brudnizki’s eponymous studio. It isn’t much like a lobby at all, at least for a place of work – the walls lined in striped fabric, bands of green, blue and grey; smartly patterned cushions atop plush velvet furniture; and cosseting, ambient lighting. I almost expect to be handed a cocktail menu. Instead, I’m hospitably offered a coffee.

“It’s about a level of detail you can expect from us,” says Brudnizki on the space, fresh from a meeting in the adjacent, rampantly green boardroom. “That is, after all, what people are paying for.”

The studio is deceptively large, with a materials library, a floral wallpapered ‘canteen’ that’s more elegant than many restaurants and a high-ceilinged workroom, where most of the 80-strong London team chatter and click behind computer screens. Another 30 hold fort at the New York office. There’s a Cecil Beaton quote Brudnizki swears by, reading it to me from his phone as we recline onto a sofa in his office: “Be daring, be difficult, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”