HOMETIME: EIGHT ROOMS

Responding to the current boom in home-ownership and home decoration among young, professional, urban Chinese, Hometime is a major exhibition for China about domestic interior design which will tour China as part of Britain’s commercial and cultural campaign, Think UK, during 2003.

The subject of the home, the private space, has considerable public appeal at a time when global communications and technology threaten to eradicate difference in the forms and surfaces of the world: how can architects, designers and policy-makers continue to give people homes and products with personal significance?

Eight of Britain’s most celebrated designers have been invited to design a room each for a character types from fiction, history or contemporary culture. Product and lighting designer Tord Boontje will collaborate with editor and stylist Ilse Crawford on a boudoir, a ‘room of one’s own’ for the modern woman. Tom Dixon will design a room for a Prime Minister that expresses the best of Britain. Interactive designers Digit will produce a virtual ‘home-from-home’ for Li Tie, the Chinese footballer playing for Everton. Radical young architectural practices F.A.T. and Block will design a sybaritic bathroom-retreat for a celebrity couple and a live/work space for a 21st century Sherlock Holmes – one of the British ‘characters’ best known in China. Ben Kelly, designer of the children's basement at the Science Museum, will develop an environment for a visually impaired child. The final room will focus on the needs of an elderly living with a younger family, designed by graduates of the Royal College of Art’s Helen Hamlyn Research Centre.