The man who created the look and atmosphere of some of the world’s most recognizable restaurants and hotels has died, Vogue reports. The Dublin-born designer and architect David Collins had been diagnosed with virulent skin cancer just three weeks ago. Over the course of his career, Collins worked on some of the most handsome and functional restaurants in England and beyond, including the Wolseley, Claridge’s Bar, Nobu in London, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, the London Hotels, and Scarpetta at Fontainebleau Miami Beach.
Collins was vastly influential, and a British GQ profile wryly notes that the layout and look of Keith McNally’s famed Pastis is really just a knockoff of Collins’s Café Rouge.
The profile also tells the story of the moment it all clicked. “[O]ne day I was watching a 1937 film called Easy Living, starring Ray Milland,” he told the magazine. “There is a scene set in an amazingly baroque hotel interior and I kept pausing the video just to study it. I was obsessed. I suddenly thought, I need to do designs that I love, like this.”
The artist in residence [GQ]
London’s Great Interior Designer David Collins Dies [Vogue via Marina O’Loughlin/Twitter]
