Program Overview

The design projects featured on this course investigate private, community, commercial and sustainable interior environments. You will consider the spatial and material relationships within surfaces, furniture, artefacts and textiles. You will develop both graphic and applied decorative making skills to enable the testing, sampling and representation of your ideas.

Using the workshop facilities and expertise, you will work with different materials (hard and soft) and mark-making approaches to experiment and collaborate with other students and experts across a range of related disciplines (including furniture, upholstery, textiles and metals) utilising a breadth of material techniques with traditional and digital workshop processes.

The Interior Design and Decoration BA course enables you to embrace material exploration for decorative interior environments. It draws upon the wide range of contexts within the interiors industry, covering domestic settings, retail, exhibition, hotel, leisure and public spaces.

Through the design projects of Year 1 and the studios of Years 2 and 3 you will investigate private, community, commercial and sustainable interior environments, you will consider the spatial and material relationships within a building envelope of surface, furniture, artefacts and textiles. You will develop both graphic and applied decorative making skills to enable the testing, sampling and representation of your ideas.

You will work with different materials (hard and soft) and mark-making approaches to experiment and collaborate with students and experts across a range of related disciplines, including furniture, upholstery, textiles and metals. You'll utilise a breadth of material techniques with traditional and digital workshop processes.

Historically, decorative designers have expressed through their work the latest advances in fashion and technology, in step with vogues and trends that colour our material culture and vernacular history.

Important archives are kept with institutions such as the V&A, Geffrye Museum and Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) which allow us to research sources, methods and approaches for contemporary practice.

You will have the opportunity to explore and develop ideas for historic and modern contexts, acquiring knowledge of graphic skills and composition, fabrication techniques, manufacturing processes, mark-making, material exploration and practice for the intimate and private, or public scales of interior decoration. As developing designers you will use this knowledge to develop sensory and aesthetically sophisticated decorative environments that communicate emotionally, culturally, socially and physically with your audience.

Throughout the course you will be asked to consider and position yourself, your skills and your interests in relation to the industry to develop a portfolio that expresses your individual practice. The  course operates within a programme of related interior design undergraduate awards, bringing together best practice from related  fields. Three cognate BA awards (Interior Architecture and Design, Interior Design, Interior Design and Decoration) enables students to explore the fundamental aspects of design for interiors, through the  lens of the built environment, the client, and/or decoration and detailing.