“I just love four-poster beds, and always have, since I was a little girl.” Henriette von Stockhausen of VSP Interiors knew exactly what she wanted to create when Marcos de Menezes, the owner of Oficina Inglesa Furniture, proposed that the two should work on a collection together.
For von Stockhausen, it represented her first foray into product design, with a collaborator whom she already knew and trusted from working on prestigious interiors projects; for Oficina Inglesa, adding four-posters filled a key gap in its portfolio of hand-made furniture.
In the end, the collection expanded to include two beds, three coronas, coordinating bedside tables and two dining chairs. “For all the pieces, I’ve either [personally] had them as antiques or I’ve bought them as antiques for a client,” says von Stockhausen. It’s taken two years to develop – “there’s a lot of technical detail in these beds, which is why it’s taken so long to work out.” For example, mattresses would once have had bespoke corner notches cut out to accommodate the posts, but these beds have been designed to take a standard mattress.
The designer worked with Oficina Inglesa’s workshops in Portugal to develop the collection: “There was a lot of effort on both sides, and it wasn’t an easy challenge. But we all wanted this to be brilliant,” she says.
Everything is made to order, so there is significant scope for customisation, including the timbers used (von Stockhausen also developed new hand-painted finishes for the collection), and the style of fabrics and trims, from ‘starburst’ gathered ceilings to the way that outer and inner valances will coordinate on the beds.
“It takes out a lot of the guesswork for designers,” says von Stockhausen. She knows first-hand how difficult it is to work out from scratch how to upholster an antique bed, where every model is unique, fabric quantities need to be carefully calculated and a master upholsterer needs to be found to do the work – here, the hard work has already been done.
To mark the launch, the showroom turned its principal space into a sumptuous bedroom (pictured above) with a ‘Chiltern’ bed as the centrepiece, dressed in layers of finery. Based on a Georgian original, its curving canopy makes it a more decorative and elaborate design than von Stockhausen’s other, more straight-lined, ‘Belgravia’ four-poster.
“I wanted this one to be a bit of a showstopper,” she says, hence its maximalist approach, a masterclass in combining pattern and colour: there’s a headboard upholstered in an antique Turkish textile, an outer valance and curtains in a fabric from Pierre Frey, a silk inner from James Hare and trim from Samuel & Sons and George Spencer Designs. It’s no wonder that, shortly after its installation, someone walked into the showroom and bought the whole roomset – bed, furniture, rug and all.
The other pieces in the collection have been just as thoughtfully developed. The three coronas are incredibly pretty, providing drama and decorative detail in spaces that might not take a full four-poster (von Stockhausen says that she often uses them in children’s rooms). The upholstered dining chairs are both based on examples that the designer says that she could use again and again: ‘Dorset’ has a high back, a floating seat cushion and cabriole legs and ‘Sussex’ is modelled on von Stockhausen’s own set of 18th-century chairs, and has an elaborate ball-and-claw detail to the feet.
“I loved doing it,” says von Stockhausen of the collaboration with Oficina Inglesa, and she reveals that more pieces are already in the pipeline. For now, though, the interesting part is seeing how others will take forward her work. “We’ve tried to create something that designers can make their own, and what I’m most excited about is seeing how they will use it.”
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