Isamaya Ffrench Spends Her Days on Faces and Her Evenings on Steel

Collectible Design · London

Reading time: 6 min

Isamaya Ffrench made her name in the most temporary medium there is. A face lasts an evening and then comes off with a cloth. The platform she founded is called Studio Iron, and the show it has brought to Brompton is made almost entirely of metal.

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STUDIO IRON takes the first floor of 3 Cromwell Place for the length of Brompton Design District, from 12 to 20 September 2026. Curated by Isamaya Ffrench, it brings together twenty seven artists, designers and master artisans across furniture, objects, sculpture, textiles and experimental practice, and it is the platform’s second outing after a debut at Saatchi Yates.

The list runs through Andu Masebo, Anoe Melliou, Apohli, Atelier Fomenta, Atelier Moore with Camille Cabanes, Barnaby Lewis, Buchanan Studio, CJ Aslan, Completed Works, Cruda, Gast Studio, Jane Wright, Jesse Butterfield, Jude x Aya, Kelly Wearstler with ARCA, Kouros Maghsoudi, Marten Herma Anderson, Panorammma, Paul Coenen, Phil Hale, Robin Hunter Blake, Thomas Cardiff, Wretched Flowers and Yaz_XL.

Read as a list it looks eclectic. Walk the catalogue material by material and it is anything but.

The name is a material brief

The overwhelming majority of this show is metal, and most of that metal is stainless steel. Andu Masebo’s Tubular Chair and Coat Stand Study are stainless and mild steel. Anoe Melliou’s Axis is polished stainless with a magnet detail. Apohli’s magazine holder and lattice dining table are stainless, the latter with beech and birch ply. Atelier Moore and Camille Cabanes contribute a stainless Chaise Diable. CJ Aslan shows a stainless chair and ottoman. Paul Coenen’s Tension Side Table is stainless.

Around that core the register widens without leaving the family. Barnaby Lewis forges steel and pairs it with leather. Panorammma’s Chainmail Chair is nickel-plated steel. Wretched Flowers build a floor lamp from anodised stainless chainmail hung with gemstone and glass beads. Kouros Maghsoudi cuts a room divider from recycled aluminium and electroplates a hand-poured ceramic tray. Gast Studio work in chrome and ABS. Thomas Cardiff shows steel with cowhide and tattooed leather.

A platform called Studio Iron has assembled a show in which the connective tissue is the alloy. That is not a coincidence and it is not a limitation; it is a curatorial brief expressed as a material, which is a considerably more disciplined way to hold twenty seven practices together than a theme would be.

From the most temporary medium to the least

Ffrench is a British creative director and makeup artist who founded her beauty brand ISAMAYA in 2022, after creative roles at Tom Ford Beauty, Burberry Beauty, Byredo and Nike, and campaign and editorial work with Madonna, Charli XCX, Zendaya, Cher and Rihanna. She sits on the board of the British Beauty Council and is producing a documentary on the origins of contemporary beauty standards.

Her signature in that work is sculptural: bold, three dimensional, built up on the face rather than applied to it. It is also, by definition, gone by the end of the night. A practice built on forms that exist for a few hours has founded a platform collecting forms in the material least willing to change. Steel holds a hammer mark for a century. That is the opposite proposition, and it explains the seriousness of the object list better than any statement about interdisciplinarity.

It also explains the curatorial confidence. Someone who has spent a career deciding what a sculptural form should do on a face is well placed to judge one on a floor.

Fine art in the same room as furniture

The show does not separate its disciplines. Phil Hale’s Interpreter, an oil on linen from 2008, hangs in the same space as Robin Hunter Blake’s UV prints on brushed aluminium dibond and Thomas Cardiff’s ink on canvas. Buchanan Studio collaborate with the artist Robert Montgomery on Daydream Ghosts, a set of stainless steel and unlacquered brass works carrying his text pieces, offered as individual sizes and as a triptych.

Kelly Wearstler’s Nudo chair and stool with ARCA are marble, and Jude x Aya’s Bakhur is marble too, which gives the room its only substantial non-metal mass. Jane Wright’s cotton lace and linen meets Jesse Butterfield’s hammered steel in a stool the two made together.

That last collaboration is worth following, because Butterfield has a solo show two floors above in the same building, where the same hammered steel language appears in a room full of sewn paper lanterns. Seeing the stool here and the stools there, one collaborative and one a series, is the closest thing the district offers to watching a designer’s vocabulary work in two registers on the same afternoon.

Why it answers the theme

Brompton’s Perfectly Imperfect asks for the process rather than the finished object, and a selling exhibition of resolved pieces is the hardest possible brief to meet on those terms. Studio Iron answers it through surface. Hammered steel records every blow. Forged steel records the heat. Electroplated ceramic records the pour. Chainmail records the hand that linked it.

In a show this dominated by metal, the process is not hidden behind the finish; the process is the finish. You are looking at the record of how each object was made because the material has no way of concealing it, which is a neat solution to a theme that most collectible design would struggle with.

It is the same argument that runs through Max Lamb’s practice, where the material and the process are allowed to finish the design, and it places this room in better company than a beauty crossover story would suggest.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The interesting thing about STUDIO IRON is not that a figure from beauty has moved into collectible design. It is how specific the move is. The platform is named after a metal, the show is built from one, and the pieces that stand out are the ones where the material has been hit, forged, linked or plated hard enough to keep a record of it.

Held against a practice where the finished work is washed off at the end of the evening, a room full of objects that will carry their hammer marks for a hundred years reads as a deliberate answer rather than a second career.