After careers in film production, Monique and Staffan Tollgard brought their storytelling and visual sensibilities to design, launching a small London practice in 2005.
Today, the business has 30 employees; its divisions include Tollgard Design Group, with three showrooms and an architectural team, and Tollgard Studio, with clients worldwide and a thriving product-design branch.
For instance, the company’s graceful Ekero table designed for Italian manufacturer Porada has become the maker’s most copied design in China, according to co-founder and head of interior design, Monique Tollgard.
From her office near London’s Pimlico Road design district, Tollgard talked to Mansion Global about why a “red thread” should guide design, why furniture shouldn’t move and why time is the ultimate luxury.
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Mansion Global: You and Staffan have talked about “the red thread” that defines your work. What does it mean?
MT: The red thread is a northern European concept. You find it in any creative work. It’s the underlying purpose. Once you find it, you can use it as a sense of balancing scales—‘That is a great piece, but not part of the red thread of this project.’ When we designed our first house together, a Victorian terraced house in [the affluent London suburb] Brook Green, I wanted a sunken Japanese dining room. My husband looked at me witheringly and said, ‘That’s not part of the red thread.’
MG: You’ve talked about things like flowers and vases as part of décor. How involved do you get in minutiae as opposed to the big picture?
MT: Let’s put it this way: We’re having our fourth meeting about bathroom hooks for one client. I don’t think we see minutiae as different from the material palette. In fact, they’re things people interact with a lot more often. I quite like the micro and macro of what we do, whether it’s picking the right tray for a particular requirement or making sure the lighting is 2700 Kelvin and not 3000. But you have to pace it. You can develop decision fatigue quickly if you consider everything at the same time. There’s a lovely quote attributed to Desmond Tutu: “There’s only one way to eat an elephant, which is one bite at a time.”
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MG: You’ve designed for clients in Amman, Riyadh and New York, among others. How do tastes differ around the world?
MT: Clients from outside the Northern Hemisphere have much greater appetite for, and appreciation of, deeper color. We did a beautiful villa in Delhi with a much richer color palette than a chalet we designed in Klosters, Switzerland. Right now, we’re on a project for a woman who’s Brazilian and her Italian-Austrian husband. That’s tough. You’re trying to bridge cultures in one home. A part of the home was more neutral for him, but we injected jolts of color and life for the Brazilian side.
MG: You’ve described design as solving “questions of living.” How do you get to understand your clients’ lives?
MT: We do in-depth research to learn more about them, from their favorite hotel to what feelings they want when they come home. We also want to learn about their relationships with materials. People have very strong feelings about that. For example, velvet reminds some people of their grandmother. That can be good or bad.
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MG: What are the three biggest mistakes you see in home design?
MT: One is furniture that moves. Furniture is not a car. It should stay where it is. A white leather sofa with movable parts is a hard pass for me. Another mistake is to multitask rooms. People should decide what will give them the most joy. Think about that guest bedroom with a bike stuck in the corner. If you want a gym, have a gym. Covid taught us how to use our houses again. We’re noticing that where some people used to put a study in the worst part of the house, like the basement. They’re now saying, ‘I spend a lot of time working here, so maybe I should put it somewhere nice, with a view.’
Also, people don’t give the laundry room or the boot room enough space. A house is a machine for living. That kind of back-of-house space is underestimated. How is a five-bedroom house supposed to work with a tiny cupboard? And why put your laundry room in the basement when the rooms that generate laundry are on top?
MG: Do you distinguish between “high” and “low” when you design?
MT: Ikea has its place. It’s not a four-letter word for us. There will always be some very hard-working and humble pieces in a home, especially in a kid’s bedroom. As kids grow up, some pieces may not answer the questions of living, so your investment has to be appropriate. We call that “chapter” furniture: Look at each room and figure out how long that chapter is. Or think about the Ikea water glasses in your kitchen cupboard. They’re not the star of the show, but they’re incredibly hard-working and used constantly.
MG: What’s your personal definition of luxury?
MT: It’s time. Time, as a commodity, is the most valuable thing we have. Having more of it in my life would allow me more time with my children, my parents, my husband, and my friends, and would allow me more time for what I do. Same for the houses we design and the pieces of functional sculpture we propose for our clients. Luxury is time for people to do it right, and to actually make something rather than churning it out on a machine. Putting time into those processes means they will last.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
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