The pro­duc­tion design­er who uses loca­tion as inspiration

This sto­ry is part of Cre­ative Resilience, an edi­to­r­i­al series pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Square­space.

“The process can start with just a tex­ture, or with just a build­ing, or a sense of place.” I’m stand­ing with pro­duc­tion design­er Bob­bie Cousins on the cor­ner of Grafton Street in London’s Somers Town. ​“Some­times there’s a script and some­times there isn’t,” he says, ​“either way, it’s about explo­ration, about delv­ing into the ideas through the sur­faces of things. I then go away and piece togeth­er a tex­ture – and that then becomes a colour palette, or a sketch of a set.”

Somers Town is a tex­tured neigh­bour­hood through which, even if you’re a native Lon­don­er, you prob­a­bly haven’t passed. It’s tucked to the east of Euston Sta­tion, to the north and the west of St Pan­cras and the British Library, and south of Cam­den. It’s one of those increas­ing­ly rare Lon­don cor­ners where time and the process of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion appears to have frozen. ​“When I come across a place like this,” says Bob­bie, ​“there’s some kind of shift in me, and I start think­ing of sto­ry and char­ac­ter. There’s some­thing about the jux­ta­po­si­tions, the strange­ness of dis­cov­ered places, that I love.”

Red Brick Peabody estates dat­ing from the Vic­to­ri­an era are punc­tu­at­ed in the Somers Town land­scape with mod­ernist low-ris­es with sub­ter­ranean garage spaces and gar­dens burst­ing beau­ti­ful­ly into bloom this ear­ly June. Describ­ing the periph­ery to the north and the east are ele­gant Geor­gian ter­races and Vil­las. Here on the south­ern extrem­i­ty of the neigh­bour­hood up against the strange­ly qui­et, locked down mur­mur of the Euston road, estates that hint at fad­ed art deco face the famil­iar Lon­don con­stel­la­tion of kebab hous­es, cor­ner shops and boozers.

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We’re look­ing at Grafton Cham­bers, a six-storey, yel­low-brick apart­ment build­ing gild­ed with arch­es and wrought iron rail­ings that guard dark bal­conies and porch­es. ​“There’s a feel­ing of… fore­bod­ing that I get from this sort of space,” he says, ​“and that’s what I’ll try to evoke in my response to the idea.”

The 34-year-old Man­ches­ter native is in the mid­dle of a devel­op­ing tra­jec­to­ry in the art depart­ments of film and TV. After school and some time on the road, he did art foun­da­tion at Man­ches­ter Met and then went on to Not­ting­ham Trent Uni­ver­si­ty to study Fine Art. ​“It was a real­ly great intro­duc­tion to work­ing on film,” he says. ​“I realised at uni that as well as mak­ing some­thing, it was great to have the pay­off of a film that went out there in the world. There is some­thing amaz­ing about cre­at­ing some­thing in three dimen­sions and then see­ing it part of this wider thing that becomes part of peo­ples’ lives.”

Bob­bie made his debut mak­ing and dress­ing sets on cult com­e­dy series Father Ted’s Christ­mas Spe­cial, and he’s most proud of his pro­duc­tion design work with direc­tor Geor­gia Par­ris on the beau­ti­ful­ly tex­tured dance dra­ma Mari. ​“The expe­ri­ence of mak­ing things and work­ing with char­ac­ters and then see­ing that devel­op on screen, that grew very grad­u­al­ly,” he explains. ​“I want­ed to be able to apply the art prac­tice that I had devel­oped into a real life sit­u­a­tion on set.”

In Peter Strickland’s fea­ture film In Fab­ric, Bob­bie served as Super­vis­ing Art Direc­tor. ​“I was able to get deeply involved in all aspects of the design in the evo­ca­tion of this made-up world, from spe­cial effects and pros­thet­ics and sets to light­ing and cos­tume. It brought togeth­er so many col­lab­o­ra­tive process­es. That expe­ri­ence made me see that this was the direc­tion I’d like to go in”.

Com­mer­cial projects and pro­mos are the meat and drink that hone the craft. ​“There’s an inten­si­ty to work­ing on small­er pro­duc­tions that’s invalu­able,” he says. ​“You have to be incred­i­bly focused and resource­ful. It push­es you to come up with real­ly cre­ative solu­tions.” One of those solu­tions was mak­ing a for­tune telling 3D mod­el of Ian Brown for King Monkey’s pro­mo. ​“I must find out where Ian’s head is right now. That is an arte­fact I wish I had been able to keep.”

Dur­ing the lock­down Bob­bie, like so many cre­atives, has been aching to work on a live pro­duc­tion. ​“I’ve been imag­in­ing being able to have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to build every set, to real­ly cre­ate the world. But these past months I’ve been find­ing myself increas­ing­ly drawn to the cre­ative process itself, even though it’s been impos­si­ble for any­one to work on live projects. I’ve been think­ing about place and form and tex­ture. Spend­ing time here in Somers Town, I can feel the process of mak­ing a piece of work begin­ning. Find­ing a space engages you and cre­ates feel­ings. Immers­ing in an imag­i­nary space is an envelop­ing expe­ri­ence that leads to the work itself.”

The enforced hia­tus in pro­duc­tion has also cre­at­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty to hone his pres­ence on the web. ​“I tried all the oth­er ways of mak­ing a web­site,” he says, ​“but it wasn’t until I got involved with Square­space that it became some­thing that real­ly helped me define what it was that was my spe­cial­i­ty. I’ve used Square­space for 10 years. It made me feel as if I was a real­ly good coder, with all the tem­plates and the tools on the back end. Now, my web­site has real­ly become a way to curate my work and to show the thread through all the things I’ve done.”

In build­ing this space, the cre­ative process itself has become clear­er to Bob­bie. ​“I’m able real­ly eas­i­ly to adapt it all the time to what makes me feel good when I open up my web page… and now I can do all this via the app on my phone.”

If you are ready to share your vision with the world? Start build­ing today: use the code LWLIES for a dis­count on a new Square­space web­site here.

Read more sto­ries from our series on Cre­ative Resilience, in part­ner­ship with Squarespace.