How to Moodboard

When we began looking for our London home, Spitalfields felt instinctively right.

Centuries of craft and heritage remain visible in its architecture. 11 Princelet Street itself dates to 1719, its history now sitting alongside the contemporary design community that continues to shape the neighbourhood. That relationship between heritage and what comes next has a lot in common with Hendel & Hendel.

Our own story is rooted in generations of British design and craftsmanship, but we have always looked at familiar ideas differently. An archival piece, architectural detail or historic reference can become the starting point for something new, reconsidered through scale, proportion and material. Harleston is one example. Its story began with a handle discovered on the door of a British public house and those historic proportions reinterpreted to create something with a completely different presence and designed for how we experience hardware in our homes and spaces today.

Within Princelet Street, those references to the past sit within a distinctly contemporary setting of Spitalfields. 

We knew this was the right place to continue the Hendel & Hendel story.

The Experience Studio was created around our belief that hardware belongs at the beginning of the design process.

Within the Materials Lab, our collections sit alongside the wider materials of an interior, creating space to bring together stone, paint, fabric and hardware while a scheme is still taking shape.

Here, proportion, finish and tactility can be considered as part of those early creative decisions, allowing hardware to inform the materials and colour around it.

It is an approach that has shaped Hendel & Hendel from the beginning: a belief in the power of the detail, and that the pieces we interact with every day should go beyond the ordinary.

Over the past twelve months, we've launched collections, hosted material workshops and welcomed designers, architects and clients from across the globe to our London home.

The Studio has also become a place for conversation. Through Hardware First: Designing from the Detail, we've brought together voices from across the interiors industry to explore the importance of materiality, colour, tactility and the role these details can make within a space.

We've seen the Materials Lab covered in samples, welcomed the wider design community during our first Shoreditch Design Week, hosted regular lunch and learn events and watched Princelet Street become a working home for our growing team in the south.

Perhaps most importantly, we've seen the Studio used in exactly the way we imagined it.

Hardware is picked up and considered in the hand. Samples are brought to the table. Finishes are explored alongside the materials they will eventually sit with, and the detail becomes part of the conversation from the beginning.

A year ago, we wanted to create more than somewhere to display cabinet hardware.

We wanted to create a place for ideas, materials and details to come together.

One year on, that remains at the heart of our Experience Studio.

As the board develops, step back and look at it as a whole.

Something that works in isolation may feel completely different once placed alongside another material. This is why physical samples can be so useful. Hold them together, move them around and see how they respond to one another and to the light within the room.

Remove anything that feels disconnected and return to your original reference if the direction begins to feel unclear.

The aim is not for every element to follow your starting point literally, but for there to be a thread between the choices you have made.