FRAME began with a simple idea: that contemporary design should leave room for individuality.
So when we invited artist and illustrator Clym Evernden to respond to the collection, we gave him a starting point rather than a finished brief: a single piece of our modular, high-backed Aspect sofa, upholstered in Harper’s Bazaar Houndstooth, and the freedom to imagine the world around it.
The result was unmistakably his. Across the studio wall, figures, plants, objects and imagined inhabitants began to appear in Clym’s loose, fluid line, turning the sofa into the fixed point within a world that existed only in his head.
“I always like there to be almost a slight unknown element to the evolution,” he told us. For Clym, observation and imagination are closely entwined. What he sees is absorbed almost unconsciously, then reappears as what he calls “an imaginative version of reality”.
That instinct has been there from the start. Growing up in Sussex, he was fascinated by birds, animals and the character of the natural world, but drawing was never simply about recording what he saw. It was, he says, “my way of expressing myself”.
His first professional break came unusually early, when he wrote to Harper’s & Queen and was invited to contribute illustrations to its fashion pages. Seeing his work in print remains a cherished memory. The connection feels particularly apt now: Harper’s & Queen would later become part of Harper’s Bazaar, whose archive has inspired six exclusive fabrics within FRAME.
At Central Saint Martins, where he studied Fashion Design, a tutor encouraged him towards a looser, brush-like pen better suited to the immediacy of his hand. That shift helped shape the fluid ink line that still defines his work today.
For FRAME, that line has been given more room to roam. Much of Clym’s work begins at a smaller scale, so painting directly across larger surfaces still feels relatively new. “It uses a different part of my brain,” he says.
The studio illustration around Aspect became the starting point. From there, Clym’s drawings moved into our showroom spaces, across the windows of our King’s Road showroom in Chelsea and onto our Decorex stand, each setting giving his line a different scale and setting.
What interests Clym is not perfection, but possibility. At his happiest, he says, he is “not really thinking that much”, simply enjoying “the line and the flow”. He also likes to leave something unresolved: “I love an edited vision,” he says of his use of negative space, allowing the viewer to complete part of the picture for themselves.
That feels especially relevant to FRAME. The furniture provides the form, but not the final expression. Fabric, colour, pattern, the room around it and the person living with it all change what that form becomes.
Clym’s imagined interior is one interpretation of Aspect, not the definitive one.
His own view of personal style is simpler still:
“Personal style begins with being true to yourself.”
A good place, perhaps, to begin a room.
