Family members’ club and nursery Maggie & Rose designs inspiring environment for adults and children
In February 2020, Family Member’s Club and Nursery, Maggie & Rose opened its doors to a brand-new site in Islington, situated in the newly renovated Islington Square. Born in London’s Kensington, Islington is the third London club to open, with one in Chiswick and a number of sites overseas in Hong Kong and Mainland China.
Maggie & Rose’s latest club in Islington Square is destined to be a firm favourite amongst families in the North London area playing host to a 12,000 square foot members’ club across two floors, housing a nursery with three studios, a members’ club, brasserie and space for children’s parties.
Occupying the former site of the North London sorting office, the design team at Maggie & Rose have taken inspiration from this and The Postal Museum for the club, keeping the traditional feel that an old post office evokes, with reclaimed, old post box doors (used as artwork on the wall and in the play area); children are also able to enjoy posting parcels and letters. The theme continues in the reception area where the interior has a bespoke postal wallpaper behind the reception desk, made up of Maggie & Rose themed stamps, that complement the space’s old, wood-panelled look and feel. Throughout the club’s corridors wooden panelling is mixed with a concrete floor and exposed ceiling to give a modern take on a traditional drawing room.
Finlay Cowan, Creative Director at Maggie & Rose said, “Maggie & Rose Islington has been designed with the goal of creating an environment that is inspiring, exciting and stimulating for both our child members and their accompanying adults. We wanted to maintain the club’s ethos for building comfortable spaces that are an extension of our members’ homes with inviting and stylish interiors.”
The club’s interior is a playfully modern take on a traditional theme which is evidenced in the modern hues used on a classic wall panelling, combined with modern concrete floors and exposed ceilings. Overall the colours and finishes are modern with brass door handles and gold taps, combined with vintage touches, such as the mustard yellow velvet lampshades, hanging in the brasserie.
A sophisticated colour palette is adopted throughout, with rich dark blue and mustard yellow muted tones mixed with light modern greys. All of the spaces are designed to be gender neutral, and at Islington two different tones of grey have allowed for the design team to be more playful when dressing the overall space.
“Throughout the club and nursery there’s a strong emphasis on using quirky one-off items from local suppliers or sourcing from reclamation yards and using the design team’s creative expertise to re-purpose them. We are also conscious about using natural materials and hand crafting beautiful bespoke pieces where we can.” said Finlay.
Reclaimed pieces include old school science lab cupboards from Fort Yard Road in Margate, which is used as a serving counter in the member’s Brasserie. Taking inspiration from the bright lights of Brighton Pier, the entrance to the nursery features two vintage hand-painted carousel horses which have been taken from an original fairground ride from the seventies and carefully restored back to its full glory, to take pride of place on the top of the carousel which has been built.
Almost all of the decorative lighting used in the club was hand-made or re-purposed, with green factory light shades restored and hanging in the bathrooms.
In line with the Maggie & Rose ethos and curriculum, throughout the Nursery and Club space, the design team have used natural materials such as wooden furnishings, hessian fabrics and toys from GreenToys – a brand which make all of their products from 100% recycled plastic.
Inspired by Brighton Pier, families can enter the nursery studios through a façade clad with columns and archways to evoke a Victorian pier, alongside wrought iron streetlights which are mounted upside down to give an element of surprise and delight. Further examples of Maggie & Rose sourcing quirky items include old milk jugs for the cooking studio, old tins for paint pots in the art studio and second-hand brass instruments for the music studio which have been turned into light fixtures.
The Nursery takes families on a further discovery of play where little ones can enter a play area through a faux yellow Smeg fridge door that leads them down a tube slide. Once inside, an imaginative experience awaits with a life-size bird’s nest, peepholes and plenty of nooks and crannies to hide away in. The space can also be booked for children’s parties.
The corridor outside the nursery studios is a great example of playful Maggie & Rose design in a surprising spot, with a Jackson Pollock inspired ‘splatting’ featuring on the floor. Using three colours that are seen throughout the club (rich dark blue, mustard yellow and light grey) the design team have created a fun strip of colour, that children can enjoy in an otherwise normal corridor.
The trio of colours is repeated throughout the second floor in the brasserie, snug cinema, library and co-working spaces. In the Brasserie, deep blue tables with brass trims are bespoke and feature alongside the Maggie & Rose dining chair – a variation of the brand’s other signature chairs which are child-friendly, lightweight and wipe-clean. Designed to bridge the gap between a highchair and an adult chair, without compromising on style, the dining chair allows families to enjoy mealtime together and kids to be part of the adult’s table. For little ones, an additional larger play area features in the brasserie with a maze of tunnels running through the Brasserie and a ball pit.
For working mums and dads, the co-working space offers parents a quiet place to pick up emails or answer calls, all whilst having the comfort of being able to keep an eye on their little ones through the two-way mirror feature. Adorning the entrance to the co-working space is a sign designed by a London-based typographer and gold leaf artist.
The club features a cosy library filled with old children’s favourites and modern classics, some of which have been sourced from ‘Hive’, a company that donates money from each sale to local high street book shops. This space is made complete with child-size ‘Baa Baa’ chairs which come in a thick grey wool-hemp from local North London furniture supplier John Hitch, made exclusively for the Maggie & Rose Islington club.
