Category: Design and Interiors

If you weren’t taken by the V&A’s retro pop art Christmas cards by Clifford Richards, you might like these Christmas cards by Orla Kiely for the Tate Gallery.

We’ve covered Orla Kiely’s retro-styled designs before, including her mugs and the 60s-style shopper bag. These new designs are exclusively for the Tate and hint at Christmas rather than being "in your face" festive. But more importantly, they look great and should put the other cards on any mantelpiece to shame.

The two designs are Xmas Blossom (left) and Fir Tree (right). Both are priced at £6.50 for six cards, complete with craft envelopes.

Find out more at the Tate website

Christmas cards – almost impossible to find something cool and classy. Or is it? Not if you pick up these fantastic retro pop art Christmas cards from the V&A Museum Shop.

The cards were designed by Clifford Richards exclusively for the V&A for this Christmas. Richards is a graphic designer going back to the 60s, specialising in producing graphics inspired by Pop Art. In fact, his work from the 60s and 70s is in the collection of the V&A Museum, so you’re sending some serious art to your friends and family.

A box of 10 cards with envelopes (each measuring 12 x 17cm) costs an incredibly reasonable £6.

Find out more at the V&A Online Shop

Habitat’s Very Important Products range is a bit hit and miss, but they’ve certainly scored a hit with this Barbara Hulanicki wallaper.

As you’ll probably know, Barbara Hulanicki worked as a fashion illustrator in the early 60s, before setting up Biba in 1964 as a mail order business, before growing it into one of the most famous department stores of the 1970s.

And this big and bold wallpaper is very much of that era, with a purple background and overlapping silver swirl, which would look great on any feature wall.

Available now (and also available in black and white), it retails for £29 per roll.

Find out more at the Habitat website

  Fat Lava – the hot collecting area in retro/vintage ceramics and the subject of a recent exhibition and book – is the name used to describe the thick, crusty and downright crazy lava glazed pots, more usually from West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s.

If, like me, you’re old enough to remember back that far you’ll recall having seen these vases sitting on shelves and fireplaces in almost every living room looking very… well… brown, but the reality is that they came in a huge range of colours and styles from the sludgy browns that many of us remember to the fabulously bright oranges, reds and blues and in styles that range wildly from honest and earthy to loud and psychedelic.  Many are one-offs with no single style, colour, finish or shape – the sky’s the limit and there’s something to suit every taste and interior (they look amazing in contemporary interiors which positively encourage them to scream their individuality out loud).

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Bombus do two great things – firstly, they recycle discarded furniture and secondly, they give it character with some very smart retro designs, in this case, using vintage comic books to bring them back to life.

Amelia at Bombus collects vintage coffee tables and chairs form various sources, in particular, anything in need of customisation – for example, the formica could be peeling or the wood scratched. The furniture is then coupled with a comic or magazine from a similar era, with the two combining to create a unique retro-styled item for your home. Or if there’s something in your home that needs an added spark, they can customise that too.

Obviously, this means every item is unique/bespoke, so an example of price is quite difficult. However, as a guide, this Spiderman table is around £255. Check after the fold for some more examples of items created by Bombus.

Find out more at the Bombus website

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