Having a keen interest in design was once a niche, but these days – as has been often discussed of late – it is much more widespread. Over the past five or six years in particular, the industry and its audience has changed entirely. Some bemoan it, some applaud it. But like it or not, it’s happening.

If anyone embodies that cross-disciplinary shift, it is Isamaya Ffrench. Long celebrated for pushing the boundaries of beauty, Ffrench has built a career on refusing neat categorisation. Her latest venture, Studio Iron, she says, feels less like a pivot than an inevitable extension of that ethos: a move into collectible design and furniture that formalises an interest that has always sat beneath the surface.

“Design has always been the root of everything for me,” she says. “It came before beauty, before fashion, before any of it.” For those who have followed her trajectory, this is less surprising than it may initially seem. Ffrench’s visual language has always been strong. You could even argue that her beauty work often felt architectural in structure. “In some ways Studio Iron is a return to that,” she explains, “but also an evolution: taking everything I’ve learned moving across disciplines and building something that can hold all of it at once.”

In an era where creative practitioners are increasingly expected to operate as multi-hyphenates, what she describes also seems to reflect a broader cultural shift. Having said that, she is clear that Studio Iron emerged partly in opposition to the pressure to remain legible. “There’s always been institutional pressure to define what you are and stay there,” she says. “I wanted to work with makers and designers in a way that didn’t have to fit a pre-existing category. Eventually, it felt more logical to just build the thing.”

Studio Iron, which launched at London’s Saatchi Yates gallery earlier this month, arrives at a moment when collectible design occupies a growing space in the industry. The democratisation of design itself, accelerated by social media, digital publishing, and a wider appetite for interiors as self-expression, has created a vastly expanded audience. But with that visibility comes a certain flattening, where objects risk becoming aesthetic shorthand rather than the product of serious creative inquiry.

Ffrench herself recognises that tension. “I think the shift [in interest towards design] has been real,” she says, “but it can also tip into aestheticisation without much depth; design as mood board rather than as thinking.” It is a sharp observation, and one that positions Studio Iron not simply as a retail proposition, but as a corrective to surface-level consumption.

At its core, the venture operates as a hybrid model: part gallery, part curated design shop, part broader creative platform. “It’s a place to acquire work from designers and makers that I believe have a unique and zeitgeist-led approach,” Ffrench explains. Rather than functioning like a conventional showroom, much of the work will be made to order, with an emphasis on dialogue between creator and collector. “Part of what I want to build is a real dialogue between the designers and the people buying: the possibility of something bespoke, made for a specific person rather than just a collection.”

At a time when design has become more visible than ever, exclusivity is often framed in purely economic terms. Ffrench appears more interested in intimacy: restoring a sense of connection between object, maker, and owner. Alongside exhibiting and selling works by others, Studio Iron will also develop its own products and expand into creative consultancy, suggesting ambitions that stretch beyond the gallery model altogether.

The inaugural collaborators reflect Ffrench’s instinctive approach to curation. Rather than imposing a rigid conceptual framework, she describes a more intuitive commonality rooted in process and material sensitivity. “Although they’re all bound by my personal taste, the thread is more about a certain quality of attention and sensibility,” she says. “Every maker and artist I’ve brought in has a relationship to their material that you can feel in the work.”

“There’s something raw and hard, and there’s evidence of process in all of them, whatever the medium is,” she continues. In many ways, this mirrors Ffrench’s own work, which has often embraced friction over polish, experimentation over perfection. Even the decision to place art and design in direct conversation feels intentional. “The contrast from placing art and design in proximity to one another is where the conversation starts.”

Studio Iron is in its early days, and is following in the footsteps of well-established design galleries. But Ffrench’s freshness to the industry perhaps gives her an edge when it comes to a understanding the current moment. While audiences have grown, appetite alone is not enough. The challenge is not simply attracting new eyes, but sustaining deeper engagement.

By her own account, that is exactly the point for this pivot. “By the nature of the people and types of works I choose to be part of Studio Iron, I hope to connect to an audience that responds to what goes into the creative process as much as, if not more than, the result.”

For a creative culture increasingly driven by immediacy and image circulation, that may be the most radical proposition of all.