The science of comfort: Irene Gunter’s Nest, and a charity that builds a room every night

INTERIORS · LONDON

Reading time: 11 min

Irene Gunter built a dining and living room inside a furniture showroom in Chelsea and specified it for the things people actually do in rooms: sit on the floor, spill wine, let a toddler take a corner at speed. She summed the whole exercise up in six words. Good design is the science of comfort.

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The Nest was a dining and living space installed inside the Tom Faulkner showroom in the Chelsea Design Quarter, designed by Irene Gunter and her team at Gunter & Co in support of Glass Door, the west London homelessness charity.

The room was arranged around a simple proposition, which Gunter states at the end of her description of it. “Good design is the science of comfort.”

That sentence is doing more than it appears to. Comfort is usually treated as an outcome, a quality a room either has or does not have, arrived at through taste. Gunter treats it as a discipline, with inputs that can be identified and specified.

Which makes The Nest a demonstration piece rather than a display. The brief she set herself was to build a room that felt, in her words, like what it means “to feel at home, to feel safe and at ease”: soft corners for a toddler’s head, rugs made for reading on the floor, a table you would not fuss over if someone spilled wine on it.

And it was built for a charity whose daily work is the assembly and dismantling of rooms, night after night, in borrowed buildings.

What the science of comfort actually specifies

Start with what Gunter is describing, because each item is a technical decision.

Soft corners are a radius on a table edge. It is a dimension, chosen by someone, and it determines whether a room can hold a small child moving quickly. A rug you can read on is a construction and a pile height, dense enough to sit on for an hour without going numb, and it silently reassigns the floor as usable surface rather than as circulation. A table you can spill wine on is a finish specification, a top that takes a mark and either sheds it or absorbs it into a patina that improves.

None of those decisions is visible in a photograph. All of them are the difference between a room that is admired and a room that is used.

Gunter has been consistent about where the effort belongs. “The items that you sit on and the items that you sleep on are more important than anything else,” she has said, which is a hierarchy of spend organised entirely around contact with the body.

She is equally direct about how families really occupy furniture. Describing a large sofa specified for a client, she noted that one person could read in a corner of it while “kids can sort of hang the other end, watching their Netflix.” That is a functional brief rather than a styling note, and it is the same brief The Nest was answering.

The second half of her argument is layering, and she puts it precisely: “a beautiful interior is layered, your eye always finding new details to discover and appreciate.”

Layering is often described as an aesthetic preference. Read it as an attention strategy and it becomes something firmer. A room that gives up everything at once is finished with you in about four seconds. A room that keeps a detail in reserve, in a trim, a stitch, a texture that only reads at close range, holds a person for longer, and a room that holds you for longer is a room you sit down in.

Comfort, on that reading, is partly a question of how long the eye stays interested. That is the science she is pointing at.

The designer, and where the technical instinct comes from

Irene Gunter is Belgian, and her route into interiors was not direct. She worked at the European Parliament before moving to London and training in interior architecture at the Inchbald School of Design.

The part of her background that shows up in the work came next. Her first role was as the sole interior designer at a London property development company, for four years, which meant construction sites, sequencing and buildability rather than schemes on paper. She then joined a larger studio and became design manager and project manager within two years, before founding Gunter & Co in 2014.

She still describes her practice in those terms. “I’m very much driven by understanding how everything is built and how it works with the building,” she has said. On her own house: “I like to engineer every centimetre out of a space.” And on process: “We spent an awful lot of time on the layout. It’s the foundation of the project, and if we hadn’t got that right, nothing would have worked.”

The studio now runs to a team of around fourteen across Nine Elms and Wimbledon, with her husband Ian Hazard as managing director. Its stated approach is “a Belgian design approach to detail, effortlessness and longevity”, and it works with history, location and architecture alongside organic forms and materials.

There is one more thing worth knowing, because it explains the toddler. At the time she was interviewed about her own home, Gunter and Hazard had two sons, aged six and one, and had moved out of a second-floor flat into a house at ground level. The Nest was designed by somebody currently living the brief.

She is also candid that newness is not the goal. “A home full of brand-new pieces never feels quite right,” she has said, describing antiques as a large part of what the studio does because they give a home “that instantly lived-in feel”. A room-set assembled entirely from donated new stock is a hard place to make that argument, which makes the lived-in quality she was aiming for the more demanding half of the job.

The showroom was a good place to make the point

Tom Faulkner has been making furniture since 1996, and the origin story is unusually literal.

He had no formal training. He worked in picture framing, then at Chrysalis Records, and was made redundant at twenty-seven while hand-painting tabletops as a sideline. Looking for a way to make what he was designing, he bought a metal fabrication workshop in Swindon outright from its owner. “I borrowed some money, actually bought all his machines, bought the whole business for 5,000 pounds,” he has said. Two employees came with it. Nigel is still there, thirty years on.

The workshop stands on the ground once occupied by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s railway works, next to Swindon station, which is a good address for a company whose material is steel.

The making is still done there: welders, finishers and specialist painters in-house, steel cut by laser and water jet for the pattern work, marble from Italy, glass, leather and bronze patinas. Pieces begin as drawings. “It starts with a sketch of a pattern or a silhouette, often literally on the back of an envelope.”

The catalogue runs from the signature Capricorn table through the Vienna and Puzzle tables in water-cut steel, the Berlin chair in oak-bark-tannery leather, and collections including Papillon, which sets dichroic film beneath glass, and Lily, whose forms come from Japanese lily pads and whose tops are cast Murano glass.

The pairing was not a cold introduction either. Gunter has separately picked out one of his pieces as a studio favourite, describing walking into the showroom with a client and finding a new stool “which is now known in our office as Shaun the Sheep stool”. That is the Lily stool, and it tells you the relationship predates the commission.

For a room about comfort, a showroom of hand-finished steel and stone is a useful setting, because it puts the softest brief in the hardest possible material context and asks the two to meet.

A charity that builds a room every night and takes it down by morning

Glass Door is the reason the room existed, and its operating model is the most interesting thing in this story.

The charity works on an open-access basis, which means no identification, no referral and no appointment. It began in 1996 as a laundry and shower service and now runs advice, casework and emergency shelter across west and south-west London from its base in Fulham.

The shelters work in circuits. A circuit is a group of seven church venues, one for each night of the week, so a guest moves around a loop and every venue hosts once. Rooms that would otherwise stand empty overnight become dormitories after the building’s day has ended, and are returned to their ordinary use by morning.

Lucy Abraham, then the charity’s chief operating officer, put it plainly. “The power of our model is that we can unlock space inside churches that would otherwise be unused overnight.”

Read that alongside a designer’s room-set and the rhyme is exact. Both are rooms made quickly inside a building that was built for something else, used intensively, and taken down again. One is assembled for a few weeks in a furniture showroom. The other is assembled and struck every single night, seven venues at a time.

The timing gives it weight too. Three weeks before the Chelsea Design Quarter event, the charity announced it was opening a fifth winter shelter circuit, taking capacity to up to 170 people a night across a 22 week season, after 1,800 people contacted it the previous winter. Its Kensington and Chelsea circuit was among its newest, which is to say the charity had recently extended into the borough where the showrooms it was being supported by actually stand.

The Chelsea Design Quarter raffle that accompanied the room was drawn at the Tom Faulkner showroom on the evening of 21 November 2019, with more than twenty prizes given by member companies. It raised £6,740 from 125 donors, with the whole sum going to the charity. The materials and furnishings in the room itself were donated by Chelsea Design Quarter members and others in the industry.

The same charity, twice, in eighteen months

Here is the connection that has gone unremarked, and it is the reason this story is worth telling properly.

Glass Door had already been inside a design institution, in a completely different role.

In the Design Museum’s Designers in Residence programme, on the theme of support, the architect Chris Hildrey developed ProxyAddress, a proposal that allocates an address to people who have lost the one thing almost every service silently requires. Bank accounts, benefits, employment and a GP all begin with a fixed address, and losing a home removes it.

Part of the work was built from filmed interviews with Glass Door staff, including overnight workers Henry Stevenson and Eddie McCormick and communications manager Melissa Kerschen, talking about what an address means to the people they see. It was on show at the Design Museum until 31 March 2018.

Roughly eighteen months later, the same charity was the beneficiary of a design installation about what a home feels like.

Put the two side by side and they complete each other. ProxyAddress is about the administrative half of home, the line on a form that lets a person exist to institutions. The Nest is about the physical half, the radius on a table edge and the pile of a rug. Design touched the same organisation twice in under two years, first as its subject and then as its cause, and addressed the two halves separately.

Very few charities get read by design that closely.

A format that arrived early

There is a lineage here too, and The Nest sits near the front of the British end of it.

The designer show house is a long-established American institution. The Kips Bay Decorator Show House has run since 1973 in aid of the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club and has raised more than 17 million dollars, with designers taking a room each in a donated property.

In London, the equivalent arrived later and in a different form. WOW!house, at the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, began in 2022 and now builds more than twenty full-size rooms and gardens by invited designers each summer, supporting United in Design through ticket sales and its opening gala.

The Nest came three years before that, about a mile up the river, as a single room in a working showroom with its contents donated rather than sponsored.

Chelsea Design Quarter went on to develop the format itself, running autumn trails in 2021 and 2022 built on exactly this pairing of showroom and designer, including Tom Faulkner with the textile artist Aiveen Daly. Its charitable partner has since moved to Furnishing Futures, which furnishes homes for women and children leaving domestic abuse.

That last move is a neat arrival. A partnership that began by funding a bed for the night now funds a furnished room, which is, more or less, the argument The Nest was making in the first place.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Room-sets are made to be taken apart. That is the form, and it usually counts as its limitation.

Here it was the point.

A room-set and a night shelter are built the same way. Both go up fast inside a building designed for something else, both have to work immediately because nobody gets a second week to adjust them, and both come down again. One is furniture in a showroom. The other is a church hall between Monday and Tuesday.

What Gunter put into the temporary version was the set of decisions that make a permanent room worth having. The radius on the corner. The pile you can sit on. The finish that takes a mark. The detail held back so the eye has somewhere to go.

Six words, and they hold up. Good design is the science of comfort.