STEVEN SAUNDERS AND TOM STROTHER
ICON OF TODAY
Steven Saunders and Tom Strother are the creative force behind Fabled Studio, restless, exacting, joyfully bold. From SUSHISAMBA to The Wolseley City, they turn briefs into living stories: narrative-led, meticulously built, and tuned to how a night really feels. The result isn’t just dining, it’s memory, unforgettable by design.
Read the full interview below.
Q: How did your individual journeys in design begin, and what experiences shaped your early careers?
Steven: Graduating from The Arts Institute in Bournemouth with a degree in 3D design, I specialised in interiors and was fortunate to secure a job straight out of uni at a company in the midlands, designing nightclubs for The Ministry of Sound, which as a 23 year old designer was great fun! I was shadowing the director of the company (it was only me and him for a time), and with the company being a Design & Build company I was exposed to a lot of know how and a lot of site time too- much more than a typical junior role. I was able to design and build 8 projects during my 2.5 years there which gave a very solid footing to progress rapidly through my design career.
Wanting a further design challenge, I was able to secure a job at the renowned David Collins Studio, and working with David directly was a huge inspiration to me. Being exposed to that level of luxury design, budgets and craftsmanship was hugely inspiring. David also kept a vast library of rare historic design books, so being able to read through them and make reference to past design masters through our work was very influential and established a huge design history knowledge into my repertoire.
Tom: I developed a love of art and design early in life. My Grandmother was an artist who introduced me to a wonderfully eclectic mix of artists work that I fell in love with from a young age, and it was she who suggested that I was a natural born interior designer and ought to pursue my livelihood in the field. Inspired by this, I went to art college in Cheltenham and then gained a degree in Interior Design at the illustrious Leeds college of Art and Design, studying in the shadows of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and began my career after graduating from Leeds at David Collins Studio.
Working with David and the team, I was introduced to a level of attention to detail and appreciation of crafts and artisans that has informed my approach to design today, alongside my continuing love of varied artists, focusing on composition, colour, form, texture and lighting and an unresting eye for fine detail.
Q: When did your paths first cross, and what inspired you to establish Fabled Studio together?
Tom and I met working together at David Collins Studio, along with our third founding member (since left), Simon Gallagher. We worked across myriad projects, suffering the stresses and strains of the projects and working in a high-pressure environment really galvanised the three of us together.
One night after a particularly stressful period, whilst de-stressing in the pub we decided that, after seemingly carrying the majority of the studio’s projects ourselves with little support, that we were young enough, and stupid enough to give this a go ourselves(!). With no kids, mortgages or worldly ties at the time, we could afford to be headstrong young designers and create a studio. We wanted our employees to be a part of, rather than our names above the door in the typical ego-centric manner, we wanted to create a collective-where employees would be a part of ‘Fabled’, each contributing to the stories we create.
Q: You work as a duo — how do your skills and perspectives complement each other?
Tom and I complement one another very well, when we work on projects together I typically work on the big picture idea - developing and beginning to carve out the project narrative, adding the concept story and layered nuance into the overarching design direction, and Tom is very strong at realising the project with a supreme eye for detail and coordination, ensuring the vision for each project is celebrated and delivered with finesse and craft.
Q: Hospitality design is at the heart of your work. What draws you to this sector, and why are you so passionate about it?
We do work across all disciplines of design- hospitality, retail and residential- but in the past few years we have had some exceptional F&B projects land on our doorstep that we just couldn’t turn down.
We are passionate about all interior sectors, and enjoy distilling the essence of each client, and each brief. F&B projects are especially close to my heart being the foodie and home chef that I am, I love nothing more than coming home at the end of the day and creating a new dish from scratch for my family- it’s my way to unwind and de-stress. So being able to work with the chefs whom I have their cookbooks on the shelf at home; Clare Smyth, Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal, Ashley Palmer Watts, Claude Bosi et al, I find deeply inspiring and humbling to be able to work on the same level and design restaurants for such esteemed luminaries of the culinary arts.
Q: Many of your projects combine elegance with a strong sense of storytelling. How do you translate narrative into interior design?
We look beyond the obvious, we get under the skin and spend exhaustive amounts of time researching our subjects. We like to add subversive layers into our work- I will always say we do not create ‘themed’ interiors, moreover, should a client or customer wish to scratch under the surface of any of our projects they will find a reason for every detail and material selection.
A recent project of ours, Fenix - for Permanently Unique Group, our client wanted to use the Greek story of the Fenix - the firebird being reborn and rising from the ashes, which is a much told and much cliched story with a danger of becoming a themed interior. So, I wanted to look beyond the myths and the gods and the titans to take inspiration from the older Aegean, I took inspiration from the landscape of antiquity that these myths played out upon. I created windswept rockfaces, ceilings lined with barley and illuminated to mimic the sun set and moon rise viewed from Mykonos beach front restaurants.
With the venue being set across two floors, I created the ground floor to be dark and brooding- resembling the scorched remains of the firebird’s nest, with cast bronze feathers lining cauldrons of flickering flame behind the central bar. The first floor represented the Fenix’s ascendence and re-birth- a soft and light filled space harmonised with natural sandstones, travertines and olive woods- all indigenous of the Aegean landscape.
Q: Which project best captures the essence of Fabled Studio so far, and what made it stand out?
To select one project that defines Fabled Studio is a tall order. By our very nature without a prescribed house style no one project sings louder than the others. A recent project that strongly demonstrates a conviction through application of our ideas is ‘Louis’ restaurant in Manchester. Our client came to us with the wish to create a cabaret restaurant, inspired by the gritty mobster café of the same name in the Godfather movies. We leant into this direction and re-watched the Godfather and also Goodfellas, of which I loved the boujis backdrop of the Copacabana nightclub the mobsters frequent, so we mixed the underlying chi-chi menace those mobsters gave to the outlandishness of the nightclub, with the raw gritty edge of Louis café to create our space.
We personified Louis too, a young Palermitano who emigrated to New York to follow his dreams, with God by his side he slowly climbed the ladder from pot-washer to club owner to launch his eponymous venue. But with success comes awareness, and with Louis now raking in dollar bills night after night the dark underbelly of the New York mafia have started to pay attention... So, we track Louis' rise and subsequent spiral into criminality throughout the club, which has now further evolved as we plan to open Louis' second outpost in Dubai.
Q: Restaurants, hotels, and bars are increasingly about experience as much as function. How do you design for atmosphere as well as space?
As with the story about Louis above, you can see that we bring a level of immersion and escapism into our projects- and this is half the reason people decide to eat out in the first place. Restaurants are moments of escape, indulgence and typically a touch of nostalgia- people want to be transported into a new experience, one where the interior is in harmony with the food and the service.
Q: What role does context, the city, neighbourhood, or culture, play in shaping your projects?
Locality has its place within our work when it needs to be there. If we look at our restaurant projects typically, we are bringing a particular type of cuisine to our audience, so the nuance and tradition surrounding that cuisine is what we bring into our work, rather than letting our work be influenced by the immediate vernacular. In our first Josephine project with Claude Bosi the brasserie is designed in the Lyonnaise style, and in Lyon the traditional restaurants serve their house wine measured by the inch, with a ruler being brought out at the end of the meal to ‘measure’ how many vertical inches of wine has been drink from the bottle, so it is these little moments, or tradition of concept origin, that act in the transportive, experiential manner that create immersion for our audience.
Q: As founders, what has been the most rewarding moment?
The most rewarding part, I feel, is having the privilege, through our design work, to create small parts of each location where we work- be that a French brasserie in central London or a hotel on the Costa Smeralda, I love the fact that we get to create that little slice of the world - somewhere other people will experience and enjoy, and make their own memories within.
Q: Looking ahead, what’s your vision for Fabled Studio over the next decade?
We are capitalising on our extensive portfolio of F&B projects to move more resolutely into applying our approach and ethos to new hotel projects. With a very exclusive new development we are currently working on in Sardinia, plus a number of 5 start hotels already under our belt historically, we are looking forward to once again expanding Fabled Studio’s reach into the hospitality sector.
We will continue to tell our stories through our work, to develop unheard and lesser spoken narratives as we delve deep and explore each nuance- we will ensure we remain at the forefront of creative interior design.
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