You can ring me on 01371 831 535.
- Initial consultation is free,
- subsequent work is £50 an hour,
- although actual CAD design work I tend to charge by the job at a rate that works out around £40 an hour.
Hi, I’m Shueya. Actually Helen Shueya Frances Rose Bannerman, but the oriental name is most distinctive. I’m an interior designer with a rich variety of other skills to draw on as needs be.
A designer should first and foremost be seen as a friend that you can bounce ideas off. If I can’t be that I’m no good to you.
That said, design is in the eye of the beholder. So you’ll either like my style or you won’t. It’s strong, vivid, richly laced with historical allusions, it firmly flies in the face of the precepts taught in Universities and Design Schools since the middle of the Twentieth Century, and it definitely isn’t Bauhaus. If you want to know why I approach design the way I do, and what drives my philosophy, I like to describe it as hot-blooded. I actually want this website to look like a painting by Rembrandt or Caravaggio. I aim to deliver powerful images in rich colours using striking, almost theatrical, lighting. If that’s the look you want for your house, your business or even yourself, then maybe, just maybe, I can do something for you.
Look at the image above. It shows a detail of one of the houses in the Piazza San Ignazio in Rome. The strong colour, the dramatic lighting, and the subtle forms of the shadows, represent the core of everything I strive to achieve. In the Italian Renaissance there was attained a mastery of beauty in human creation that has never been surpassed. This house is an example of the Baroque movement that succeeded that Renaissance and was its supreme flowering.
But by the beginning of the Twentieth Century, artists found themselves feeling deeply threatened by technological innovation (particularly the development of colour photography by the Lumière brothers), and living in a world where science and technology seemed to have all the initiative. So the opening years of the Twentieth Century were marked by an extraordinary wealth of effort in searching for a new paradigm for art, for design and for architecture. In the midst of this the First World War burst upon Europe, and in the economic distress that followed, all this deep searching was abandoned in favour of the cheapest and most basic option available, which can be summed up in one word: CONCRETE.
This is all a bit of a pity, because there was actually a lot going on in the world of the arts at the time, especially in architecture, which was discovering a host of novel concepts that could have led to the opening new century’s making a spectacular positive contribution to what is now laughably called the “environment”. It is from the work of these great experimenters that I take my inspiration, men like Gaudi, Mackintosh, Horta and especially the magnificent Frank Lloyd Wright.
An example of one of my designs appears below: submitted as a competition entry for the rebuilding of a popular wedding venue, it uses a combination of traditional elements and modern expansive use of glass which would work well as a retail emporium.
