Find out why Fels is the fresh young design platform to know now
A collaboration between Finbar Conran and Oscar Mitchell, Fels is a design platform with a difference. It quickly gained a reputation as an industry tastemaker, thanks to a focus on emerging designers such as Marco Campardo, Rio Kobayashi and Andu Masebo. Since its inception, Fels has expanded to include exhibition curation, production, consultancy and interiors. It also has a physical gallery space in Knightsbridge and an online store.
Can you tell us the origin story of Fels and what gave you the idea for its unique point of view?
Oscar and I met on our foundation at Falmouth University in 2012 and remained close. After working in art fabrication and exhibition production for seven years, we saw Fels as an opportunity to both collaborate with artists and designers we liked, and to develop projects alongside them to create unique objects and artworks.
It ultimately grew during Covid, when artists and designers had so much time to make pieces but nowhere to show. We put on our first exhibition in the summer of 2021 with 25 artists and more than 70 objects, then moved towards physical spaces and interiors.
How do you source the gallery’s items and find the designer that you want to represent?
Most, if not all, of our current items come from our projects. These all have a pre-conceived theme or tone, and we work around that to research and discover new things. It’s an approach that makes for unique collections and allows us to come across, research and explore such eclectic makers.
What do you think unites their work?
Each artist or designer we collaborate with is making something distinctive at a very high quality. The objects we show, sell and produce are beautiful and, we think, have timeless qualities and an interesting materiality, process or concept. We believe the people we work with are at the forefront of collectible contemporary design.
‘The Farm Shop’, your exhibition at last year’s London Design Festival, was a memorable moment. Can you share more about what the project entailed?
For ‘The Farm Shop’, we collaborated with Guan Lee (the owner of Grymsdyke Farm) and Marco Campardo to hand-pick a talented group of designers to participate. We acted as a gallery, hosting the exhibition, launching ‘The Farm Shop’ as a brand and aiding the curators in logistics and sales. It was a pretty fluid process, and everyone helped in all aspects – a real feat of collaboration and curation, with an enormous amount of support beyond ourselves, Guan and Marco.
What’s next?
The studio is very flexible – we’re interested in anything that gets proposed to us. Recently, we’ve had smaller residential and consultancy projects, but we are looking forward to some larger curatorial work later in the year, fels.world.
