A KENDAL women with an off-beat approach to design is putting the cool back into wallpaper and her name on the map, reports Beth Broomby.
Former Queen Katherine School pupil Rachel Kelly has been making her mark on the collective design consciousness with her much-talked-about interactive wallpaper. Her work has been cropping up in all the right places from a national chain of shop windows to glossy magazines and her name has been mooted as one to watch for the future.
Her creations effortlessly combine a basic background wallpaper with a series of gorgeous, coloured ‘stickers’ for home improvers to mess around with and customise their own rooms.
These stickers aren’t the kind of thing you used to stick on your rough book when you were a child, they are grown up and glossy in luscious shades and cutting edge designs.
“I was looking into DIY and the way people work. I looked at things like stencils and I began to realise people were set up to fail. They had to mix the colours and things often went wrong. I wanted to design something that would always go right.
“I thought about creating stickers so people could make their own patterns,” she said.
Needless to say her unique approach, which draws inspiration from Bavaria to Japan, has had the design-aware magazines from Elle to the Observer doing a double take over her work.
This summer, the 28-year-old was commissioned to design the shop window for high street fashion store Oasis.
Her bright chrysanthemum-inspired design was on display in their shop windows throughout the country, giving her nationwide exposure at grass-roots level.
But it is her DIY approach to creating seriously sexy interior design that really got people talking.
Drinks giant Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur caught on to the Rachel Kelly thing and commissioned her to create a special Sex and The City inspired wallpaper in four different colourways – one for each of the characters Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha.
The up-and-coming designer has also just completed a London-based trade fair called 100 per cent Design, and the Chelsea Crafts Fair.
It is all a far cry from her teenage years spent in the art block at Queen Katherine School but, according to Rachel, that is where it all began, when former art teacher at the school Ian Burke taught her print-making.
“He was fantastic, a really great teacher,” she said.
Her work is about to be displayed at the Design Museum, London, as part of an exhibition called Somewhere Totally Else – The European Design Show, until January 4 featuring the most innovative design projects to have been unveiled in Europe in the past two years.
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