Podcast Transcript - Episode Eleven, Christine Van Der Hurd

Patrick: [00:00:01] Hello, I'm Paddy O'Donnell, and this is the Chromologist from Farrow & Ball, the podcast where paint and color meet life.

Christine: [00:00:09] I've always had a very strong connection with color. It's always just been a way of life for me.

Patrick: [00:00:15] I'm a color expert, and I think about color deeply and daily, about its influence and the impact it has on our lives.

Speaker3: [00:00:23] I love it. It's very peaceful.

Patrick: [00:00:25] That really lovely, lovely blue that you get through the background and the mackerel.

Speaker3: [00:00:29] It's quite like the color of your eyes, actually.

Patrick: [00:00:31] Is it? Yeah. Are you flirting with me.

Patrick: [00:00:34] And that's why we've created this series to hear from artists, designers, writers and creators about how color has shaped them. Going back to the red carpet, it's just.

Speaker4: [00:00:44] This sort of energy of that color. And I think I wore a lot of red at that time on Downton as well. Lady Mary was wearing red a lot.

Speaker5: [00:00:52] I think we underestimate how much color does influence us and how it makes us feel. And it's so easy to say, oh, I just love yellow. Why?

Patrick: [00:01:09] For this special episode of The Chromologist in celebration of London Design Festival, my guest is a textile designer, Christine Van der hurd. Christine is a bit of a doyenne of the textile industry. I've always been hugely inspired by her unusually creative mind. For more than three decades, she's collaborated with major brands like Cappellini, Liberty London and Louis Vuitton, as well as her own eponymous label, Van der hurd and some of her work can be seen in permanent museum collections such as the V&A in London. She says she's been inspired by many different places, cultures and countries, from her father's antique store to the modernist movement and trips to Spain and Morocco. Christine, it's so lovely to be here. Thank you so much for letting us into your lovely home.

Christine: [00:01:52] Thank you so much.

Patrick: [00:01:54] And you are resplendent in colour. Your home is resplendent in colour. So how long have you been here? Because you're a Notting Hill girl anyway. Yes. So this is kind of your spirit, this part of London.

Christine: [00:02:05] It definitely was the catalyst that my father's shop on Portobello Road, and knowing the whole area was a very important part of choosing this house and this mews. I love living in a mews.

Patrick: [00:02:19] Where you're so clever here, because obviously we've got lots of your textiles on the sofas, and I think I'm assuming this is one of your beautiful rugs under our feet. Yes. But then you've got splashes of colour everywhere. But there's this. Is it all white? Is it just the soft white?

Christine: [00:02:34] Well, I have to say, white and shades of white are incredibly difficult. I know that from painting myself and mixing the colours and carpets to find the colour. To get this white, it took probably about 20, maybe 30 tries. Um, so it changes throughout the house so the different whites become softer or creamier, pinker. And that's the thing with white. It just takes on different colors from what you're surrounded with. You know, whether it be a painting or a carpet textile.

Patrick: [00:03:08] Yeah. It's wonderful. So one of the reasons why we're here and you foolishly let us into your home for an hour or so, is we're here to talk about colors that are kind of part of your journey through life. So we're going to start with the color of your childhood.

Christine: [00:03:28] My memory from my childhood is quite dark, and I tossed between preference red and brinjal, and I really was drawn to brinjal. So brinjal, obviously, you probably know this. Aubergine. Yeah. My parents had the most exquisite Georgian house on Hamilton Terrace that they bought just after the war. And they had, you know, so little money to be able to do it up. But they must have found this offcut of Wilton carpet and they did this run all the way up the house. And I remember my days of sliding down the banisters and jumping the stairs with these beautiful deep aubergine carpet. And I think that that was my first memory of colour. Now the house was very dark, rooms not huge, but my parents were antique dealers, so a lot of the artefacts, the upholstery, the carvings, the furniture, ceramics were quite dark.

Patrick: [00:04:33] Okay. Did your father specialise in a particular period?

Christine: [00:04:36] Well, he. When I was young he was actually specialising in porcelain and also works of art like carved wood figures. Um, he also had a collection of narwhales. And he also collected these mice and monkeys and and all sorts of monkeys. So he was called Jeffrey Van the Monkey Man. Right. Okay. He was quite an eccentric. He was an entomologist by training, and had gone off to the Amazon to do research for the Natural History Museum, and his actual passion was not making money. It was just beautiful things. It's the love of love of things, objects and things. And so the memory of that house is, is quite dark.

Patrick: [00:05:21] In a good way or oppressive.

Christine: [00:05:23] I mean, I felt very safe in the house. We had an enormous garden, and he used to take me into the garden to look under the stones and find ants nests and caterpillars and, um, we, you know, he'd always go in the evening and pick beautiful roses for my mother and put them in a vase. And so in that sense, the outside was just fresh and and happy and colourful. But I did feel a sense of darkness within the house. And so this colour, this brinjal, is definitely where I was going and my brother had gone off to school. I was seven years younger than him and so it felt quite lonely. And those are my memories, you know, it's just it's they changed. They did change. Very.

Patrick: [00:06:13] I'm sort of visualizing it because actually I visited I was in London the other weekend and I visited Sambourne house. Yes. And you know, that kind of it's very layered. It's very rich, but there's kind of very little breathing space. Yeah.

Christine: [00:06:26] But also, if you think about it, 1951, you know, there wasn't the money to do some lavish kitchen. Oh, there was a porter's chair in the entranceway. And I used to, you know, curl up in this porter's chair and there was the telephone right next to it. So, you know, if I had my girlfriends, I could speak to them. But, you know, it was it was gloomy, dark for me. So I realized that, you know, that's what I wanted to get away from. But recently I've actually started using quite a lot of aubergine in my carpets and it's a great bouncing off colour, you know. It's amazing if you put that with some chartreuse. I was going to say. With chartreuse green and a little bit of like Klein blue and then cream. You know that that's a it's a great mix.

Patrick: [00:07:15] It kind of tempers the stronger. Colors around it. Yeah.

Christine: [00:07:21] For instance, coming up these stairs, the happiness I have, the joy from this pink carpet. It just makes me want to laugh. And maybe after that aubergine carpet that I had all my life and my parents house, this pink carpet in it, it's got these amazing flecks of, like, a cerise color. It's sort of.

Patrick: [00:07:44] Screaming pink, is it? It's got.

Christine: [00:07:45] A very soft pink and.

Patrick: [00:07:47] It's lovely sort of broken color to it.

Christine: [00:07:49] And then you've got that Chanel poster at the top, which is a hint of that pink.

Patrick: [00:07:56] So we are moving in into the color of your youth. So where are we? Which point in your youth are we at? And what's the color? Christine.

Christine: [00:08:06] So my mother was a huge inspiration to me, and as a child and teenager I used to sit and watch her. So she had a little sewing room in Hamilton Terrace, and I'd go shopping with her and she would buy these exquisite fabrics. And one day I was with her. And when Whiteleys was at department store, it was one of those stores that had been going since, I guess, late 1800s. And it had this regal staircase, and you'd go up to the ladies department and I'd sit on the floor and watch mummy put on these cocktail dresses, and she'd put this green satin cocktail dress on, and she had jet black hair, and I just fell in love with her and the green. So I think the next color is this Danish lawn. Okay. It reminds me, obviously, of that moment, but there must have been a sort of rebellion in me that started happening. 12 1314 as I was heading towards, um, you know, Bieber days, bus stop, buying clothes and loving color, beginning my love.

Patrick: [00:09:19] Are we talking late 60s here?

Christine: [00:09:21] Yes, late.

Patrick: [00:09:22] Late 60s. And London was kind of the place, wasn't it?

Christine: [00:09:25] Yeah, yeah. And so the next thing we did was having moved from, um, Hamilton Terrace. My father had two shops by then on Portobello Road. He was now buying much more objet d'art and beautiful carved pieces, religious carvings, um, tapestries. More color was coming in and Portobello Road was edgy. You know, I used to go down there early hours of the morning and buy ceramics and jewellery and all sorts of things like that. And then one day, coming back, I must have been about 18.5. I walked past John Oliver at the paint shop and went in and saw this bright green paint, and I went, ooh, that's nice. Um, I'm going to paint my wall. And I painted my your bedroom in my bedroom, the wall at Portobello Road and this bright green. And I've been painting away and my father comes back and he is furious with me.

Patrick: [00:10:26] How far have you got with the painting?

Christine: [00:10:27] Um, probably two thirds of the way. Okay. But he first of all, loathed the colour green. He thinks it's very unlucky. He was very superstitious. So secondly, you know, he had he was a finisher in his early days after he left the. Oh, a specialist paint finisher. Yes. Okay. And so he was looking at the way I was painting it.

Patrick: [00:10:50] You're slightly shoddy and.

Christine: [00:10:52] That sloppy green trickling down the wall. And, I mean, he was not at all happy. So this green makes me laugh because I continued in that vein when at the age of about 22, I then buy this bright, bright green two CV, that grass green one that was.

Patrick: [00:11:13] I remember those and some of them had stripy roofs as well, didn't they?

Christine: [00:11:16] Yeah, and I was I was enamoured with it. I just thought this was I'd reached heaven for that. So I was probably 22, 23 and only had the car for two years, because by the time I was 25, I'd moved to New York. But again, my father came in with like, why have you bought this green car? You know, it's the most unlucky colour to buy a car. And I hate to say that subsequently I had a very serious accident and turned it over on black ice.

Patrick: [00:11:46] Yeah, the tyres were about three centimetres wide on the two CVS, but.

Christine: [00:11:51] I had a lot of fun with it because it was convertible. So you had the roof done and I'd be whizzing around London and one.

Patrick: [00:11:59] Of those dodgy. Oh yeah, the dash gearboxes. Yeah.

Christine: [00:12:03] Hilarious.

Patrick: [00:12:04] Yeah. They're a great car weren't they. Yeah.

Christine: [00:12:06] So. So the green and then I, you know I found myself with that green. It was, it was coming out of this darkness into colour and just really understanding colour and colour was beginning to creep into my design work a lot when I was by that time, because you were.

Patrick: [00:12:26] You were at art college. You were at Winchester, weren't you? Yes. So when did the textile love and the weaving, when did that develop for you as a child?

Christine: [00:12:34] The watching mummy buying this fabric and, you know, taking me to all these incredible shops, you know, when, when we had haberdashery. Yes. And we know even when we were in Paris we would go to say a shop that sold all veiling fabric. I mean, I was fascinated by fabric. I couldn't help it. So, you know, we were always buying lengths of fabric. And then there was no question of that. What I wanted to do, I wanted to design textiles.

Patrick: [00:13:02] So Danish Lawn is we have our main collection of 132 colors, but we also have a big archive. And that's an archive color. Yeah. And it's that beautiful, rich, sort of verdant, almost emerald. Yeah. Sitting rather nicely next to your gemstone.

Christine: [00:13:16] It's my lucky ring. I love.

Patrick: [00:13:18] It. We all need a lucky ring. Yeah.

Christine: [00:13:21] I mean, for me, jewelry is and was a huge passion. So from an early childhood, as I said, I would go down Portobello Road looking at jewelry and buying jewelry and actually selling jewelry. And then later, as we'll get to my sort of more middle years, I did a lot of jewelry designing and manufacturing and in Jaipur, and this comes from that.

Patrick: [00:13:46] And it's beautiful, I love it. It's a really good color. My friend has a dining room in Wales in that we call it slightly Kermit Green. Yes.

Christine: [00:13:53] Slightly yes. Yes.

Patrick: [00:13:54] No Danish lawn. It is.

Christine: [00:13:56] It's got a lot of depth in it.

Patrick: [00:13:58] Yeah, it really has.

Christine: [00:14:00] So then this is actually the The Quiet Room. Although we.

Patrick: [00:14:06] This is your library.

Christine: [00:14:07] And I feel, you know, we've used one of our wallpapers Hector. It becomes like a texture that wraps around the room. And with these red shelves, I think it's.

Patrick: [00:14:19] It's really beautiful, isn't it? Because, you know, the red is that lovely shot because you've got is that kind of chocolate and almost like a.

Christine: [00:14:25] Little dot here or.

Patrick: [00:14:27] Something as well.

Christine: [00:14:27] Exactly.

Christine: [00:14:28] But I, you know, this is a room where I just love to come and lie on the sofa and read and relax.

Patrick: [00:14:38] So moving on. I always think this must be really difficult for anybody to choose the colour of your defining decades. So what is the colour?

Christine: [00:14:47] Well, you know, for me, I have to say that my defining decade, but it went on for a lot longer than ten years, was when I got on the plane and left London for New York, thinking I was probably going to come back in three months time.

Patrick: [00:15:03] And we're in the 70s and.

Christine: [00:15:05] We are 1977. Okay. And I'd fallen in love with a man. And I also had fallen in love with New York very, very quickly. It was everything, all the energy, the light, the color. So the color I have chosen is Butterweed, which is.

Patrick: [00:15:24] So how would you describe it? Because you're the color woman. So I love you to describe that.

Christine: [00:15:29] So for me it's lemon, chartreuse, acid, zingy. You know, it's a color that brings light to my life. Okay, so I felt New York has brought light to my life. So this color reminds me of my relationship to New York. We were very lucky in like the late 70s. We fell upon renting a 5000 square foot loft. And it was, I mean, magical. You know, we'd come from a railroad apartment because of windows.

Patrick: [00:16:05] Yeah. Huge windows, huge windows.

Christine: [00:16:08] And, you know, you could just literally zoom across the kids as they got older, used to get their roller skates and go backwards and forwards across the loft. But one of the colors that I used in this loft was this lemon chartreuse as a carpet.

Patrick: [00:16:24] And this is New York when it's still quite gritty, wasn't it? It wasn't gritty. Fluffed up.

Christine: [00:16:29] Yeah. Yeah. So gritty. And in those days, very quickly you got to meet the, the the famous, the, the elite, the photographers, the, you know, Andy Warhol walking down the street, coming into the store. Robert Mapplethorpe. His dealer was above our gallery on Broadway, and I started establishing myself as a designer in New York as a young designer. In those days, you sold a collection. You paint your designs, you group them together, and then you go over there and you see different buyers for fashion, home furnishings. So these.

Patrick: [00:17:09] Were just sketches, not sort of finished product, not textiles or anything.

Christine: [00:17:13] Printed textiles. So you would sell your design. And then by the time I was pregnant with my first child in 1980, I realized that it was very difficult to trudge around a great big portfolio of designs, and I started designing carpets. It was about 1980 81, so we had a gallery with mid-century furniture, and we were bringing in some contemporary designers like Tom Dixon and Ron Arad from England. Okay. Uh, and we were mixing my carpets and the contemporary furniture and the mid-century. And so, yes, that was the start of New York. Lemon. And then, you know, everything that happened in my designing. I noticed that a lot of my carpet designs had this.

Patrick: [00:18:05] Introducing this.

Christine: [00:18:06] Yes, this color.

Patrick: [00:18:06] Shock of color through.

Christine: [00:18:07] It because I actually started I mean, it sounds strange, but I started feeling that this chartreuse color was a neutral because it actually worked with whatever color I put in, all the colors of the yarns that I chose, it worked with it. And this became my go to color.

Patrick: [00:18:26] The yellows are really funny because again, that's another archive color you've chosen there. And you described it much more beautifully than I have. But it's funny, isn't it, because yellows I keep thinking they're having a renaissance and they're never quite having a renaissance, right? I think decorators and designers love yellow. I think most people are quite nervous of yellow and how to use it.

Christine: [00:18:47] I think it's a very good color to use. It can be like a neutral. Yeah. You know, people shouldn't be frightened of it. I think it's a you know, it makes your heart sing. When you walk in a room and there's a yellow wall and you can actually you can put a lot of paintings, photographs. It works so well with photography. This is so, so this is New York.

Patrick: [00:19:09] This is your New York days. Look, Isabella Rossellini. John and Yoko. Pablo.

Christine: [00:19:14] I knew Annie Leibovitz.

Patrick: [00:19:16] I can say is that Annie Leibovitz? And what I love here on this wall, Christine, is your pop of red with David Byrne as well. It's just a fantastic, fantastic portrait, isn't it?

Christine: [00:19:28] My New York days. There's me.

Patrick: [00:19:30] It's signed to you. Yeah. So here we are, and we're going to be talking about your color of where you are now. So if you can share that color. My dear Christine. And tell us what it is. Yeah.

Christine: [00:19:45] This last color was quite tricky for me. Okay. Because where am I today? You know, I'm surrounded by color. And yet I quite like a piece. You know, I like the ability to just put color on a very simple background. I quite often I realize that with my paintings today that cream or shades of cream, because actually there are a million shades of cream.

Patrick: [00:20:13] We've got quite a few in our collection.

Christine: [00:20:15] Yes, exactly. And cream is, you know, I've had a hard time between actually slipper satin and Schoolhouse White. Okay. Both being, you know, beautiful whites of subtle differences. So I'm actually going to go for the slipper satin. Good for.

Patrick: [00:20:33] You. See? Making decision.

Christine: [00:20:35] The hard decision. I realized that when we design carpets and we dye the yarn, the nuance of putting the tiniest bit of a dye to change that color, and it can be just a drop, right, will really change the how that cream is going to look at the whites, going to look against all of the other colors.

Patrick: [00:20:59] And what is that? Is that putting a bit more black through it? Or it could be black.

Christine: [00:21:03] It could.

Patrick: [00:21:03] Be any red, it.

Christine: [00:21:04] Could be blue, it could be green.

Patrick: [00:21:06] Okay.

Christine: [00:21:06] That's the thing that people don't realize I think about white is that it's infinitesimal. It just goes on.

Patrick: [00:21:13] I'm glad you got that word out.

Christine: [00:21:16] And it's peaceful. Yeah.

Patrick: [00:21:18] See, it's really it's really interesting because I always hugely respect those really soft whites and creams that people use. I don't have the discipline to use it. And maybe I'm going through your New York phase at the moment where it's all about color. Um, but I always walk into white spaces and just feel very relaxed, but I can't use it myself yet. I will have my white phase at some point because I.

Christine: [00:21:45] Think it's quite frightening. People could walk into a room and they're frightened of whites.

Patrick: [00:21:52] Why do you think that is?

Christine: [00:21:53] I think quite a few people are afraid of white, whether they're wearing clothes or where I get.

Patrick: [00:21:58] That because I get curry down my top all the time.

Christine: [00:22:00] Well, that that. Yes, exactly. But I think they feel that the place is unfinished, right? They feel that they need to have a color to finish it.

Patrick: [00:22:12] And I get that. I think I said about my own anxiety about white. I did a white room once and I couldn't cope with it. I had to I painted it out within three weeks.

Christine: [00:22:21] Yeah, that's fascinating to me. Although I have to say, in our bedroom we have quite a wild, uh. Well, it's a fabric, actually. Oh, good.

Patrick: [00:22:31] I'm relieved. I thought you were going to say we have a wild time not to.

Christine: [00:22:37] Um. And we have gone to the library, which we've met upstairs, which is much darker. And I've used one of our wallpapers and it has a very atmospheric room because I actually, I don't like a white library. I just don't think that works. So it has its place. And I think Spain, where I spend a lot of my time as a child and into my, you know, 50s, all the walls were whitewashed.

Patrick: [00:23:06] Those kind of white villages of Andalusia and stuff.

Christine: [00:23:08] Exactly.

Christine: [00:23:11] And then you've got my little office, which is my pride and joy. I love my little office.

Patrick: [00:23:17] Is this where you do all your sketching and painting?

Christine: [00:23:19] Paintings. I've tidied it up for you, though.

Christine: [00:23:22] Paddy, why did you.

Patrick: [00:23:23] Bother with that? Oh, no. I love seeing work in progress. I love mess.

Christine: [00:23:27] And then I just got my lovely family and friends. And I think those paintings should be.

Christine: [00:23:33] Yeah.

Patrick: [00:23:33] Colour is obviously very emotional for all of us, isn't it?

Christine: [00:23:37] Or I mean, so if I'm, if I have the wrong colour around me, it's going to really bring me down. And that's with clothing. It's with jewellery, it's with when I'm painting.

Christine: [00:23:48] Even your.

Patrick: [00:23:48] Kind of slightly froufrou. It's Mongolian isn't it? Sort of lamb.

Christine: [00:23:51] Shocking, shocking.

Christine: [00:23:53] Shocking. Candyfloss. Pink.

Patrick: [00:23:54] Do you ever wear that around your shoulders?

Christine: [00:23:56] I cover my feet when I'm cold.

Christine: [00:23:58] Like a.

Patrick: [00:23:58] Shrug when you go to Sainsbury's, but love.

Christine: [00:24:01] It.

Patrick: [00:24:06] So now, Christine, this is where don't look so terrified. This is the fun bit because I give you a colour and it's kind of. And I didn't because you are the queen of colour. Oh my god. And I've seen your drawers of yarns and you have lots of blues running through lots of your designs. And I know when you and I have had a chat before, we're talking about how important is that little bit of black through a colour? Yes. Do you kind of slightly knock it back a bit? Absolutely. So we have this beautiful sort of mid to deep blue called denim. Ooh. And I'm calling it Van De Nimes.

Christine: [00:24:41] Oh I love that.

Patrick: [00:24:44] So this is your lovely colour.

Christine: [00:24:46] Oh thank you Paddy. I love this colour. It's a beautiful.

Christine: [00:24:50] Colour. It's a.

Patrick: [00:24:51] Really good.

Christine: [00:24:52] De Nimes.

Patrick: [00:24:52] Blue.

Christine: [00:24:53] But shadow.

Patrick: [00:24:55] Excellent. We love that. Even better. I have seen that color in some of your texts, I'm sure. Oh yes.

Christine: [00:25:01] You have. I mean, that new collection Opticality has has this sort of color in it? Yes. Merci beaucoup, mon plaisir.

Christine: [00:25:11] Thank you so much.

Patrick: [00:25:12] It's been so lovely. If you'd like to follow Christine, she is at Van Der Herd on Instagram. You can also follow us at Farrow & Ball. And of course, you can discover all the colors we've talked about today on our website. And if you've enjoyed this conversation, please, please do tell your friends. My guest next week is director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Alyssa Nitchun. The Chromologist is a Farrow & Ball and Feast collective production. The producer is Sarah Cuddon. Until the next one. Goodbye and big hugs.