Three years ago, the designer Charlotte Taylor moved back to her family home in Bromley, where she’d lived as a teenager. After spells in Paris and a Hackney loft, returning in her late 20s to a suburban two-up two-down in Kent was something of a shock. A week in, a handwritten note dropped on her doormat. Not a “welcome to the neighbourhood” thing, but a letter from Mrs Williams at No 19, who had seen Taylor standing naked at the window and considered it “inappropriate”. The note signed off: “Please can this stop – it isn’t right.”
That letter now has pride of place on Taylor’s fridge, held in place by food-shaped magnets (a baguette, a fried egg, a block of parmesan). “I see her almost every day,” Taylor laughs as she gives me a tour of the house, “and she averts her gaze. It’s been three years. We’re over it. But I think some people are still confused about my presence here.”
Taylor has designed the interiors for a listening bar in Clerkenwell and remodelled an Art Deco home in Vienna, and is working on a flagship store for a fashion brand in SoHo, New York. Last year, she curated exhibitions at major design festivals in Copenhagen and London.
But the house in Bromley is probably the fullest representation of Taylor’s aesthetic, which the World of Interiors described as “trashy minimalism”, a description she likes: “I don’t think trash is a bad word,” she says. Everywhere you look is the playful and absurd, more incongruous for the fact you are in deepest suburbia. In the kitchen, a row of fancy Japanese knives hover on a magnetic strip, alongside a pair of metal handcuffs. Wooden nunchaku are casually strewn on the sofa. “My Thai boxing coach is training me in knife fighting,” Taylor explains. “He really wants to turn me into a ninja.” I ask where this training happens. “At Virgin Active,” she says.
‘Design should be more fun’: Taylor thinks her contemporaries are ‘too serious’
Taylor, who turns 31 on the day we meet, is especially interested in domestic design, and she rails against her industry’s preference for perfection. Many of her projects have featured artfully untidy domestic spaces, including unmade beds and messy desks, which chime with a trend prevalent across social media for designed environments that appear lived in.
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In all of her work, Taylor likes to embrace the mischievous. Each year she makes new business “cards”, which have included cigarette lighters, a hammer and a stamp that she carries with a block of ink. For 2026, she hoped to put her contact details inside fortune cookies. “But you need to order, like, 10,000 of them,” she says. “And I don’t have the storage.”
The purpose of these quirky loss-leaders is mainly to entertain, but she likes that they also prick the commonplace pomposity of her industry. “Design should be more fun,” she believes, “people are too serious a lot of the time.”
Subtly undermining the design world – or at least playfully teasing it – has become a recurring feature of her work. It has a pleasingly democratic element: design isn’t just an eye-wateringly expensive Eames lounge chair in the swankiest postcodes – it can be a quirky gothic seat in the ’burbs made by a hobbyist on eBay. It can be for anyone, anywhere.
“Whenever I tell people I live in Bromley, they’re like, ‘Bromley-by-Bow?’” she says, referencing the more edgy area of inner east London. “I’m like, ‘Oh no, Bromley Bromley.’ And you can see the judgment. But I don’t care any more.”
Taylor has always been immersed in conversations about design. Her father was a lighting designer, constantly sketching technical ideas. Her mother, who worked for his company, was forever moving furniture around their home. Taylor thinks she inherited the spirit of her parents – who both now live, separately, five minutes from her – if not the detail. “My father’s lighting is slightly different to my style,” she says. “And my mum is more English, I’d say. She has a few union jack cushions.”
Taylor thought she would study architecture, but was deterred by the seven-year qualification. She instead studied design at Goldsmiths, before transferring to the Chelsea College of Arts to do fine art. She became an illustrator, specialising in architectural drawings, some for magazines and furniture brands but “mainly for myself”.
During the Covid lockdown she created 3D CGI renderings of fantastical rooms and spaces: a marble bedroom orbiting the moon; a fake hotel in Paris called Chez Cléo that was so convincing that people still ask for its address. She would work up the designs and post the images to her newly huge Instagram following.
The 3D work became a portfolio for Taylor, created from her home office without financial or physical constraint. “Especially during Covid, renders went crazy because people wanted to escape,” she says. “And from a client perspective, because people couldn’t shoot, they turned to 3D.”
Taylor is in the strange position now of being asked to work on architectural projects despite having skipped formal study (she often works alongside qualified architects to ease paperwork and red tape). She is also being approached by prestigious festivals to curate spaces. At last year’s London Design Festival, Taylor filled a Georgian townhouse in Kensington with the work of 30 female designers. She was especially keen to avoid the reverential “cliquiness” (and astronomical prices) that often accompanies the world of collectible design.
Her comfy home in Kent is full of curios, including a fine penknife collection
“I’ve really wanted to break down the barriers and arrogance that comes with a lot of design shows and galleries,” she says. “You’re put into this position where you feel you’re not supposed to be there. I want to create an atmosphere where people do feel comfortable, so that design doesn’t feel like a foreign object, because furniture is supposed to be lived with.”
The website for Taylor’s studio is currently a holding page with an image of her branded lighter, as it has been for years. She plans to keep it that way. “I like that people come to me for everything, and don’t really know what I do. If they have a proposal, I’m happy to hear it!” This approach makes it hard to label Taylor: “interdisciplinary artist” maybe comes closest. How, I ask, does she describe her style. “I always say ‘organic’ or ‘intuitive’,” she replies, smiling. “Words that mean a lot and nothing at the same time.”
Still, the anti-promotion is working: Taylor is currently designing a branded instant coffee for a client in Barcelona, a limited-edition set of pyjamas for the Greek brand It’s a Shirt, and a range of her own merch (caps, more lighters, corkscrews) under the banner Bitch of All Trades. She is also designing furniture, starting with a chair, coffee table and a modular bed that has a pull-out section perfect for an ashtray.
Taylor’s dream project, though, would be to design a hotel, an actual one. “Because I can touch everything from the branding to the restaurant to the bed linen,” she says, her eyes growing wide. “It incorporates so many things. I could have my lighters there, my pyjamas... and it’s all under one roof.”
I suggest the beds could be left deliberately unmade.
“Yeah,” Taylor says. “Someone comes in and dishevels them.”