>> Deconstructivism, broadly characterised by
playfully breaking up the façades of buildings
into shining agglomerations of glass and steel,
was in vogue. But Brudnizki, despite being a
student of the era, wasn’t quite content. “My
idea was about detailing the cube: ‘How can we
add details back into the spaces?’ That has been
the journey over the last 20 years.”
Brudnizki’s principal influences include the
French art deco designer Paul Dupré-Lafon,
whom he credits for his lasting fascination
with the finishes applied to interior design
objects. Usually, Dupré-Lafon would apply
three different finishes to an object to create
an idea of luxury. “You would have bronze,”
says Brudnizki, “you would have a leather
and you would have a lacquer.” But Brudnizki
doesn’t restrict himself to three
finishes in a room, or even on an
object. “Three is a good number.
Four might be a bit too much.
But five could be great.” A space
such as the nightclub in Annabel’s
illustrates this philosophy per-
fectly: every cushion, banquette,
curtain, wall, floor, ceiling, lamp-
shade, chair, bar, door and table
has a different pattern or finish
to it. But, incredibly, nothing
clashes amid the melange of
jungle prints, palm-leaf motifs
and leopard print.
Over time, other Brudnizki hall-
marks developed: the location
and size of the bar became very
important to each of his projects.
“It is the point of reference when
you arrive,” he explains. “It will
guide you.” Artworks and art-historical nods
became common too. After Brudnizki and his
team settled on a concept loosely inspired by
Paradise Lost and the Garden Of Eden for the
Annabel’s nightclub, they went out to gather
material on “anything animal, anything floral”.
In the end, they had 20 boxfuls of material to
sift through for a space roughly 375 square
metres. The concept presentation, 50 pages
long, opened with a 19th-century oil painting
from the Vatican’s collection, Johann Wenzel
Peter’s “Adam And Eve In The Garden Of Eden”.
Though they might seem randomly thrown
together, Brudnizki’s interiors are carefully
considered. He uses Annabel’s reception as
an example. There’s a simplicity to the pleated
silk fabric, a dark pea-green that adorns the
walls, and the sleek limestone floor, both
deliberately chosen to contrast the riot of
plaster flowers encrusted around the top half
of the room. And the front desk is a converted
Mattia Bonetti side table – basically a bulbous
chrome desk – that gives the room a modern
touch, in contrast to the classical plasterwork.
Brudnizki hasn’t just seen things he likes andchucked them into the building wherever he
can find space.
“I’ve done minimalism,” says Brudnizki. “I’ve
done maximalism. I’ve done modernism.
I’ve done classicism. I’ve done all of these
four major stylistic approaches and what I do
now is I take something from everything and
I put it together.”Atypical Brudnizki project begins life in
a barn in Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.
“Barn” is an understatement; it’s more
like a small factory. Surrounded by industrial
machinery, it’s about as far from the flower-
burst rooms of Annabel’s as one can get.
This is where Francis Russell, an industrial
designer who has been working with Brudnizkifor a decade, produces fittings, furniture and
equipment to order. FF&E, as it’s known, is an
essential part of designing a hotel, restaurant
or club. Think of it as everything that would
fall out of the building if you turned it upside
down and shook it. The wrong chair or lamp can
ruin the effect of a room, so everything has to
be made bespoke.
When I visit, Russell’s company is working on
a bespoke chandelier for the new Four Seasons
hotel in Madrid, one of about 100 ongoing
projects the workshop will have at any one
point. It made the chairs for Harry’s Bar and
is also working on a number of prototypes for
Brudnizki’s product design studio, And Objects.
Among Russell’s other clients are a plethora of
big names – property developer Nick Candy and
Claridge’s have, respectively, ordered light fit-
tings and door handles – but many are subjectto NDAs. And though Russell specialises in
metals, his workshop can make pretty much
anything – and, just as importantly, can make
it look almost any age.
There can be a slight moment of cognitive
dissonance on realising that despite all the his-
torical nods found in Brudnizki’s idiosyncratic
aesthetic, very little that finds its way into
his projects is actually, well, old. To some, this
smacks of inauthenticity. Tim Hayward, a res-
taurateur and food columnist, calls the style “a
kind of Edwardian bling. But none of it’s origi-
nal. Everything has to be new and box fresh.”
For the moneyed international clientele that
people Brudnizki’s high-end interiors, the idea
of British history and tradition appeals greatly,
and, Hayward says, Martin Brudnizki Design
Studio (MBDS) offers enough of
this that “wealthy Americans,
wealthy Arabs, wealthy Chinese”
feel like they’re somewhere
special. If you’re a self-made oli-
garch, you might not notice the
difference between somewhere
genuinely old and somewhere that
simply resembles an old place –
or, more accurately, you might
not care. “[They] would want to
go into a place such as Rules [the
Covent Garden restaurant founded
in 1798], but they wouldn’t want
to see things being dusty. They
like them clean. They want it to
be new – that’s the point.”
There is undeniably a meticu-
lousness and a cleanliness that has
always been part of Brudnizki’s
practice. When I put the idea to
him, he agrees that his is a deliberately “clean”
aesthetic, but argues that’s a strength. “I would
hate to create something that looks Edwardian.
It would be so dark. The colours would be so
brown! It would have nothing interesting to it.”As a teenager, growing up in Stockholm,
Brudnizki was allowed to design his
own bedroom. “I was very meticulous
about it,” he recalls. “If I woke up in the morning
and saw a crack between the wall and the
ceiling, I would have to get filler out and fill it.”
The teenage Brudnizki’s tastes were relatively
modern and minimalist; his room had a black-
and-white colour scheme and featured a white
lacquer-and-chrome desk. The cold tube lighting
from his desk lamp gave him a lifelong aversion
to blue light. “I hated that light and I couldn’t
understand why. Now I know. It made it like
being in a toilet or some sort of hospital.” He
laughs. “I did my minimalist phase very early. I
got it out of my system.”
Brudnizki was born in Stockholm in 1966 to
a German mother, Karin, and a Polish father,
Andre, who met near Hamburg in the late >>The Johann Wenzel Peter painting that inspired Annabel’s‘ I did my minimalist
phase very early. I got
it out of my system’PhotographJames McDonaldMARTIN BRUDNIZKI04-20FeatureMartinBrudnizki_3446750.indd 213 10/02/2020 15:21
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