The room
Deslyn was founded by Sarah-Jane Allen after a decade under Martin Brudnizki, David Collins and Elicyon. The practice delivers residential and hospitality interiors from a single space in Earlsfield, anchored by a pink John Brinsmead & Sons piano, with abstract canvases along the walls.
It is a room that holds two trades at once. On one side of the curtain, fabric and stone and the slow business of specification. On the other, paint bottles and a squeegee and a canvas flat on the boards.
The table
Specification is unglamorous and almost entirely tactile: swatches held to the light, samples set against each other, a decision made by hand rather than on a screen. Photographing someone at their own table doing work they have done ten thousand times needs no direction. You wait, and the real gesture arrives.
The floor
Behind the curtain the table gives way to canvas laid flat. The abstracts that hang in the showroom, and that reappear in completed interiors, are poured and pulled here with squeegees and acrylic.
This is the part worth understanding about the practice. The art is not sourced to dress a scheme after the fact. It is made first, in the same room, by the same person, and the interiors are built outward from it.
Spaces
Commissions of this kind are taken for design practices, architects and hospitality interiors, shot on film and delivered as hand-edited scans. Prints and enlargements remain available from the archived negatives afterwards.