Holism at Home with Louisa Grey

“Our ideology is focused on creating your own personal world where aesthetics, ethics and experience go hand in hand. Eliminating stress from everyday life can seem unattainable. Limiting stress, however, is achievable – and this starts with the environments we work in. If the home is a retreat, there is no reason why the workplace cannot transcend to the same level.”

– Louisa Grey, Founder of House of Grey

Interior designer, stylist and longtime friend and Armadillo collaborator Louisa Grey’s studio House of Grey has long focused on a holistic approach to design that positively impacts health and contentment.

Photography by Michael Sinclair

London-based House of Grey’s interiors are identifiable for not just how they look – soothing, calm and gentle – but also how they make you feel – energized, inspired and content.

With the Home of Holism, the House of Grey’s latest innovative project, Grey turned her focus to her own studio and home, creating a hybrid space that functions as a tranquil home retreat, an adaptive working studio and an immersive showcase of the House of Grey design ethos in practice.

The resulting ‘Home of Holism’ project is a breathtaking study in collaboration. Along with the spacial design, Grey has created bespoke products with a select group of similarly-minded businesses: Armadillo, Bauwerk and Aoiro, to create an inspiring blueprint for what is possible – that empathetic and richly thoughtful design can go beyond aesthetics, creating healthful spaces that improve wellbeing, cognitive performance, creativity, and happiness.

Tell us about the Home of Holism project – what was the initial inspiration? What personal insights did you draw from to inform the work?

In 2019, we faced sourcing a new studio space, and after viewing many potential options, none of them had the right feeling. We quickly realized that we needed to fully design our own creative space from the ground up and revolutionize the concept of “the work environment” at the time.

In our practice, we’ve noticed that many people talk about when they’re next going on holiday and the need to get away from their day-to-day lives. A symptom of burnout culture is the need to escape – people want to go on holiday or dream of quitting their job to escape from the daily grind.

At House of Grey, we have always believed in creating homes that enable a person to decompress and download the day in a nurturing environment. We make homes that act as a personal, daily retreat – we wanted to demonstrate that you can build a life you don’t want to escape from. As with the ‘home retreat’, the new House of Grey studio design needed to go beyond aesthetics. We needed to design our new working life and family home in detail and shape our own healthy workspace to enhance our daily lives whilst increasing cognitive performance and boosting our collective creativity.

The idea of a work/life balance is often talked about but rarely achieved. Tell us how you’ve mastered this elusive balance with Home of Holism.

Home of Holism was brought to life to balance the needs of a designer, maker and creator; a working mother; a business owner; a social being; and a person who holds the value of health in high esteem.

Alongside form and function, enhancing human health has been at the core of our design process for many years. Now more than ever, we need to make conscious choices when we decide what to surround ourselves with and where we spend our time – whether at home or at work. Our new concept for holistic work/life balance simultaneously encompasses every aspect of my life.

Tell us more about the creative collaborations you’ve worked on to bring Home of Holism to life.

In Home of Holism, non-toxic, natural resources harvested directly from the earth ground us in nature for a calmer environment, improving concentration and providing stress reduction. The materials used in the Home of Holism are chosen consciously for their tangible health and wellbeing benefits and contribute to its overall sustainability.

As a design studio, we intentionally seek out others with the same integrity and a sense of purpose to strengthen our positive design legacy, stretching it beyond our own parameters. Years in the making, we wanted to get these pieces right, we began work on what we call ‘Native Elements’ for the home through collaborations with our partners – Armadillo, AOIRO and Bauwerk Paints.

The Ellipse rug collection with Armadillo, the Visual Silence lime-wash paint collection with Bauwerk and KOTO air purify mist developed with Aoiro can be all experienced at the “Home of Holism”.

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