At Home with with Charlotte Taylor

The wonderful thing about books is also the most frustrating thing to those who love them. They are imperfect physical things, and the more you live with them the more they bear the palm marks of affection. Spines soften, coffee traces settle in, and toddlers simply cannot comprehend that an antiquarian first edition is not a colouring book.

Each season we invite someone we admire to photograph a collection of STANLEY/BARKER titles in their home.

The British designer Charlotte Taylor works with that same tension between care and disorder, permanence and use. In both her digital environments and the rooms she shapes in the real world, objects are allowed to show their history. Light, colour, and the deeply personal logic of carefully chosen everyday things become her materials. Nothing is perfectly polished, nothing pretends to be untouched. Her spaces acknowledge that living with objects, books included, is an ongoing negotiation, and that meaning often emerges from the marks left behind.

STANLEY/BARKER: What was the first book you remember feeling like it “belonged” to you?

CT: Species of Spaces by Georges Perec. I remember feeling instantly curious and completely connected to it. I’ve probably bought twenty copies over the years because, even though it’s my favourite, I keep giving it away. There’s something about it that I always want to share; it feels too generous a book to keep only for myself.

 

S/B: When you are imagining a room, at what point do books and objects enter the picture?

CT: Very early, almost immediately. I never imagine a room as a clean neutral shell, it’s always activated by the things and presences that live in it. Books, chairs, a glass left on a table, a sudoku falling off the table. These objects become the first clues to how the room behaves and what kind of life it holds. 

S/B: Both your digital and physical interiors manage to feel lived in; they seem to carry a history. What draws you to the imperfect in a medium that is usually hyper-polished?

CT: Perfection feels static and dishonest to me. I’m drawn to rooms that look like they’ve been touched, adjusted and lived with even if they’re entirely fabricated. Imperfection creates movement, it suggests that someone has just left the frame or is about to return. In digital work especially, I like to disturb the surface a little, to resist the sterilised, render-perfect world and some humanity and daily chaos into the 3D realm. 

S/B: In your images there is always a sense of elegant disorder — things placed just so, yet carrying the marks of use. Where does that instinct for the beautifully imperfect come from, and how does it guide the way you design?


CT: I was always shifting, rearranging and moving my bedroom and personal spaces as a kid,  slightly restless and teetering between highly organised and contradictory chaotic. I think of disorder as a form of precision, a carefully held looseness that allows room for life to enter, without the constraints of a too polished frame. 

S/B: Your work sits at a point where architecture, image-making, and storytelling meet. When you build a space, digital or physical, do you imagine the lives unfolding inside it?

CT: Always, even the most minimal space, for me, has a kind of narrative structure. I imagine how someone might move through it, what their morning and evening would be in the room and how that would shift their interaction with the space. I don’t always picture specific characters, but rather gestures, rhythms and small rituals. 

S/B: You’re currently moving to Paris. What will it mean to leave the space we see in the images?


CT: That space has been both a home and a studio for the past few years. It will remain as my London base so it's not a goodbye just a different relationship with the home, most of the furniture will remain in London too, only the books are coming with me, which do take up half the home so may look a bit sparse.