The Design Museum’s CEO is the latest thinker to host the castle’s new programme of contemporary salons. He facilitated a discussion about the importance of design, the role of museums – and the future of both
It’s difficult to stand in the Eastnor Castle library and think of anything other than the past. The entire room is lined with old leather-bound books. Black-and-white family photographs are propped on the 100-year-old Steinway piano, and a faint ticking emanates from the antique clock on the desk.
But Tim Marlow, CEO of the Design Museum and former artistic director at the Royal Academy of Arts, is here to talk about the future.
‘We've been looking at what a museum, or what the Design Museum, might become, and we've been trying to think laterally about where design is, where it's going and how that impacts on the museum and what we might be doing in the future,’ he says.
Marlow is the latest innovator to host Salon Eastnor – the new programme of conceptual gatherings that invites artists, writers and creatives to come and use the castle as a setting for the exploration of ideas (read more about the inaugural salon with Jack Savoretti here). He’s a natural fit; there’s barely a cultural institution in London that Marlow, a prolific writer, broadcaster and art historian, hasn’t had a hand in shaping.
He and his team are here to discuss the future of the Design Museum – big-picture stuff that, he says, feels all the more fruitful in a setting like Eastnor Castle.
‘What I love about here is it's an example of something singular,’ he says. ‘As a design museum, we don't want to be rooted in the past, but [we’re thinking about] how we can use fragments of the past in interesting and inspiring ways to redefine what the future might be. That’s definitely poignant in a place like this.’
Marlow’s discussion adds to a long history of creative thinking at Eastnor, which is discernible at every object-packed turn. Lord Tennyson spent time here (his portrait hangs in the Octagon Saloon); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who spent her early years in nearby Ledbury, was a regular visitor to the library; and works by GF Watts adorn many rooms. And then there’s the design.
‘The entirety of the place is like nothing I’ve ever seen before,’ says Marlow. ‘I think the restored Pugin rooms are phenomenal. I think the library's a beautiful place. I think these Renaissance tapestries are stunning. Really, it is like nothing else.’
As a curator, Marlow is well aware of how the design of a place can impact our ability to think creatively.
‘A lot of modernist spaces have an openness and a transparency,’ he says. ‘The openness to everything else means that you have a sense of a blank canvas each time you're there... But this place absolutely carries the weight of history in every pore, and you're aware of that. It is very inspiring to be in a different kind of place – a place like this.’
Tim Marlow OBE is the director of the Design Museum in London; designmuseum.org