Lovegrove’s studio is a high-tech cave caught between the fashionable squares of Notting Hill and the neighbouring ghetto. It is dotted with the kind of artifacts you might find in any wizard’s lair—fragments of wood, shells, pieces of bone—as well as the more predictable paraphernalia of a contemporary design studio, a row of computer screens, a bicycle with a bamboo frame, and a new printer, still in its box.
Lovegrove, his architect wife Mishka, and their 14-year-old son, live above the studio which has been designed as a kind of manifesto. Outside, it has an anonymous, blank façade, but once the electric door slides noiselessly open, and you cross the threshold on a metal ramp, you confront what looks like a dizzyingly fragile spiral staircase.