DESIGNHEADS: Ethel Adary
7.29.22
What’s design got to do with it? DESIGNHEADS is an interview series profiling the next generation of designers, tastemakers, and creatives *shaking up* the design world.
Name: Ethel Adary
Age: 22
Location: London
Instagram: @IloveEthel11
Website: ( in construction )
Are you a designer? Why or why not? Yes I am, because I can
One word to describe your take on design: Messy
The last thing you made: A flatpack table made of a bespoke plywood and coloured paper composite material made to show time passing by highlighting everyday marks on wooden furniture.
The next thing you want to make: My next project is a vanity project recreating my logo on a chair.
A designed object you adore: Shiro Kuramata’s “How High the Moon” chair is such an iconic design. The ambiguity it holds between sculpture and industrial design, light and heavy, form and function is mesmerising.
A designed object you can’t stand the sight of: Fruit cutters that are fruit-shaped. The knife is right there.
A moment of pure creative joy: Opening my sketchbook and messing it up.
When we say “designing the future,” what comes to mind? For me, designing the future means breaking the mold of what’s been done before.
If you could show your work to anyone in the world, who would it be? I love Giorgio Morandi’s painting, I think he would have a field day painting my designs.
Your aesthetic embodied as a...
sound? It’d be the sound an orchestra makes just before a performance, lot of anticipation and a lot of tuning in. You never know what you are gonna get.
color? Sky blue because it’s honestly all I wear.
texture? Frosted, because I like to blur the lines
Your *grail*: if you could own one iconic design work, what would it be? My grail is the Gufram Pratone long chair. I’m quite small, so I’d be swallowed whole <3=<3
What’s next for you? I am excited to be a postgraduate with nothing better to do than build furniture in my shed.︎