If you’ve been on the design-fair circuit over the past 12 months, there’s a strong likelihood that you have encountered the work of Faye Toogood. Whether it’s being named guest of honour at the Stockholm Furniture Fair and designer of the year at Paris’s Maison & Objet, working with Italian manufacturers including Cc-Tapis, Tacchini and Poltrona Frau, collaborating on an installation for Danish brand Frama’s Copenhagen flagship or working on the Toogood fashion line with her sister Erica, the British designer has, of late, been unavoidable. “Sorry about that,” Toogood tells Monocle when we meet at her London studio, where she heads up a team of 25. “Something seems to have clicked and it’s amazing to be riding that wave.” 

As we sit down, Toogood posits that this surge in popularity is linked to her work’s emotive content. “I’ve been putting more of myself into my work without worrying about how it sits in the context of design,” she says. “I’m working intuitively and allowing space for experimentation.” When she founded her studio in 2008, Toogood came from a background in fine art and sculpture, and had been working as a stylist at The World of Interiors for eight years. “I didn’t set out to be a designer, so I started quite apologetically,” she adds. “Because I was on the fringes of design, art and fashion, I was seen as not being serious, as dabbling. But I’ve formed a place for myself on these fringes.” 

Now firmly established in the industry, Toogood is regularly tapped by manufacturers looking to work with modern designers. When we meet, she has just returned from Nagoya, where she spent a week hand-painting pots with roses for Japanese ceramics company Noritake. The resulting collection of limited-edition pieces, called Rose, will be shown at Milan Design Week this year, with scaled-up production of the pieces slated for 2026. Toogood is also returning to Milan this April to launch her second line of furniture with Brianza-based manufacturer Tacchini, after the success of her Cosmic collection of a sofa, shelves, mirrors and pendant lights, unveiled at last year’s fair. Titled Bread and Butter, the new collaboration revolves around a modular sofa rendered in a soft, light yellow leather. “I like looking to food for inspiration; it’s a smack of reality,” she says. “It’s about rejoicing in the everyday, in the food I grew up with, in the food I give to my children.”

As a designer, Toogood infuses her work with a tenderness rarely spoken about in the design industry. Her Roly Poly chair’s voluptuous shape draws inspiration from her personal experience of pregnancy and motherhood. To sit in her Gummy armchair is to receive an upholstered hug. “I’m quite a tactile person, an emotional person,” she says. “I often feel like a thermometer because I’m hypersensitive to the energy of what’s going on around me. A lot of my designs are autobiographical but they’re also out of genuine care for others.”

According to Toogood, this need to put society over the self is the reason she became a designer and not an artist – albeit in her own experimental manner. Every new project often begins with a word, a song title or even a poem, providing a starting point to shape the identity of each piece. She makes early miniature models using materials such as sheets of aluminium or pieces of clay, allowing her to play around and see what comes out. And during the editing stages, Toogood will begin to search for tension between the soft and the hard, the precious and the raw, the industrial and the handmade, before finding a balance. When it comes to the actual production of these pieces, Toogood mostly works with carpenters and upholsterers based in the UK. 

It’s a far cry from intricately drawn sketches or computer-assisted design – but her divergent method for design is now at a stage in which it is being welcomed by the very industry that sets the norms. “It’s my role to break down boundaries, agitate, open doors, question, blur,” says Toogood. “I might not have achieved everything I wanted to achieve but I’ve opened up the conversation through my own experimentation. I’ve helped to widen the lens of what design is. For that, I’m proud.”

As Monocle leaves the serenity of House of Toogood, the designer changes into a pair of paint-splattered overalls to tackle a mobile and table. For Toogood, there’s no time to rest but always plenty of time to play. 

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