For the podcast series The Design Dialogues, Elizabeth Choppin, Editor-in-Chief of Design Anthology UK meets Sophie Lovell and her daughter Orlando, co-founders of The Common Table and editors of Taste and Place: A Design Hotels book to talk about food, regional identity, culinary heritage and travel.

S72+ is a new collaborative dinner series by studio_lovell, founders of The Common Table. It grew out of our desire to (quite literally) expand the conversations around food. We believe the best way to bring people together to exchange views and experiences is around a table. So, together with Vitsoe, our co-host for this first dinner in Berlin, we gathered twelve individuals of different ages and from a range of different industries and disciplines, including design, technology, architecture, manufacture, publishing, compliance, food and distribution, to join us at the table and talk about a pivotal issue of our time: supply chains. The location for this interdisciplinary dinner discussion was the living/work space of Arch+ magazine in Berlin. studio_lovell will continue their dinner series with varying partners in different disciplines and industries. Each time there will be new guest constellations, new locations and new topics for discussion. Just as we continue to seek out the people and projects forging ways towards a better, fairer food future with The Common Table, the S72+ dinners aim to help put some of those projects into action through new connections and inspiration. Please get in touch if you are interested in collaborating.

Photo © Lena Giovanazzi

Hotels are unique storytelling hubs. They are defined by travel, but also by locality. Hotels are the first ports of call for the traveller to encounter first-hand new places, people, produce, cultures, tastes and techniques. And what better way to experience a visceral connection—a “taste of place”—than through food?

So Taste and Place: The Design Hotels Book is a food book with a difference. It takes the reader on a global journey with contributions from leading food writers, upcoming chefs and culinary innovators through examples of forward-looking ideas and inspirational practices. And all of this from a different perspective: a widening of the beam of focus to help show that if you pull on one string, you move all the others.

The book’s broad and inclusive embrace of food is richly illustrated with surprising examples found in and around selected Design Hotels™ locations. The stories in this volume go beyond the dish, the kitchen and the dining room. They explore the connectivity between food and locality, provenance, production, people, landscape and architecture from a holistic perspective. They are the binding agents for sharing new encounters with Design Hotels™’ readers, guests and hoteliers.

From regional terroir through the kitchen to the community, the stories gathered from special people behind the scenes, include tales and methods of self-production, social engagement, collaborative work practice, respect for cultures and ingredients, rethinking food waste and visionary big-picture hospitality.

From a big picture perspective, the mother and daughter team Sophie and Orlando Lovell of studio_lovell developed and edited this book for Design Hotels to encompass connective storytelling by respected writers, including LinYee Yuan, Gisela Williams, Ursula Heinzelmann and Nicholas Gill alongside newer talents such as Carla Bragagnini and Jake Potashnick. The journey through the chapters is designed to be a cyclical one of nourishment and renewal.

The themes are visually brought to life with specially commissioned photography from Marina Denisova, Vivek Vadoliya, Robbie Lawrence, Arnaud Montgard, Yuna Yagi, Stephanie Füssenich, Daniel Lober and Maureen Evans, with illustrations by Hanni Pannier. This book is a journey through food and culinary understanding from the terrain of Swiss and Japanese mountains and valleys, via the ancient island of Crete, Umbrian olive groves and the Oaxacan coast, dropping in on young kitchen teams in Ukraine and the Peloponnese along the way as well as exploring innovative practices in the Caribbean, Mexico and Indonesia.

How can we travel responsibly? How can we give back more than we take? As we look for ways to transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon world, the ecosystem of a hotel seen through the lens of food provides a perfect microcosm to better understand bigger system changes. With this book, we at Design Hotels™ reflect on what we bring to these processes in terms of the hospitality we support and want to see in the future.

The Common Table is a publishing platform for food futures and systemic change founded and edited by Sophie Lovell and Orlando Lovell.

Through The Common Table, we share stories and ideas about food from around the world by people who are searching for ways to fix it. Our goal is to understand how systems of production, distribution and consumption can be changed – and to help identify the people and projects forging ways towards a better, fairer food future.

As a mother-daughter creative duo, living together in Berlin, we have many years of experience in all things design, architecture – and food. Our home has always been a place where we have cooked and hosted many meals and fed heated discussions with wonderful guests. Now we have extended our kitchen table and turned it into something bigger: a virtual workplace and a platform for change – through food.

We are starting this platform by inviting as “dinner guests” to our virtual table people we love, people who inspire us, people we would like to know more about and people we believe should be heard. Together we will ask, share, gather, investigate and exchange.

If you have inspiring stories or thoughts to share about changing the food system, feel free to reach out, we’d love to hear from you. All are welcome at The Common Table.

Email us at hello(at)thecommontable.eu

To celebrate the centenary of their razor blade factory in Thüringen, Germany, the shaving company Harry’s asked Sophie Lovell to make a custom, in-house book. The result is a story about survival, determination, about adaptability, about people and one of the publications we are most proud of to date.

“Incredibly, in the century that has passed since its founding, this factory has weathered the Great Depression the Nazi regime, two world wars, Soviet occupation, two more regime changes and four changes in ownership. It is still there, still making razor blades, and is very much flourishing. The company that was once called Ritzma-Werk, then VEB Feintechnik, then Feintechnik GmbH, which was bought in 2014 by the American startup Harry’s Inc., has continued to keep production going through many turbulent changes. The primary reason for this survival is an unbroken thread of workers, managers, engineers and owners who have grafted, fixed, patched, taken risks, updated and invented their way through good times and bad.”

This book is for them.

studio_lovell are four-dimensional thinkers offering consultation in transformative strategic context building through the medium of digital and print publication.

studio_lovell use their interdisciplinary experience in the fields of design, architecture and food to help reposition brands towards a regenerative, ethical, big-picture future.

studio_lovell combine their holistic approach with their worldwide network of collaborators, enabling them to develop sustainable solutions across a range of media.

Sophie Lovell was born in London and first studied Biology at Sussex University before going on to study Public Art and Design at Chelsea College of Art & Design. She moved to Berlin in 1994 and has been the Germany Editor of ‘Wallpaper’ magazine since 2000. Sophie was formerly editor-in-chief of uncube magazine; executive editor of ‘form’ magazine; architecture and design editor of ‘Qvest’ magazine, and editor-in-chief of ‘Directions’ magazine. She has written and edited a number of books on design and architecture and is the author of the monograph ‘Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible’.

Orlando Lovell was born in London and raised in Berlin. After her foundation course at Central Saint Martins College in London, she studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven, visiting Hyperwerk at FHNW in Basel for an exchange semester in between. She worked at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, for the eating designer Marije Vogelzang and was editor of The DIFD (Dutch Institute of Food and Design). She has exhibited in Austria, Portugal, Netherlands and more.

They are both co-founders and co-editors of The Common Table, a platform for food futures and systemic change.

What is the role of language in contemporary design? Orlando Lovell has recently teamed up with her mother, the design writer, editor and curator Sophie Lovell, to form the intergenerational studio_lovell. In DAMN° magazine issue no.47 they discuss language, design and system change from their respective perspectives.

lovell_studio are four-dimensional thinkers offering consultation in transformative strategic context building through the medium of digital and print publication.

lovell_studio use their interdisciplinary experience in the fields of design, architecture and food to help reposition brands towards a regenerative, ethical, big-picture future.

lovell_studio combine their holistic approach with their worldwide network of collaborators, enabling them to develop sustainable solutions across a range of media.

sophie(at)studiolovell.com