Children with power tools: Andrée Cooke and Michael Marriott

Contemporary art and design specialist and curator Andrée Cooke is a parent of a pupil of King Alfred School, an independent, co-educational school for 4–18-year-olds that offers a progressive and individually focused educational environment. Although much of the school’s estate is designed and maintained to nurture this engaging, community atmosphere, Cooke noticed that the common room area for Years 7–10 had become a lacklustre, purposeless space; little more than a corridor with a bank of lockers and a smattering of tired furniture.

As an interior-design consultant who has worked on luxury development and social projects internationally (recently including New York event space and fashion photography studio Spring Studios and its neighbouring workspace/members’ club Spring Place), Cooke saw an opportunity to both reinvent the space and provide the students with a lifelong learning experience in the process.

With the support of King Alfred’s Head of Year 9, Claire Murphy, its on-site architect, Belinda Webb, and Christopher Raymond from its Design Technology department, Cooke was able to enlist the acclaimed furniture designer Michael Marriott to lead the project. With his flair for working with recycled and everyday materials, his utilitarian approach to design, and his reputation for honest materiality, Marriott was the ideal designer to introduce King Alfred’s students to the creative possibilities and everyday realities of working life as a maker, as well as to ensure the finished space met the functional needs of the people who would actually use it – the students themselves.