MONTE-CARLO, MONACO
TIM GOSLING
MONTE-CARLO, MONACO
TIM GOSLING Exploring art, product design, superyachts and more with the multifaceted London designer.
An aesthete of all trades, who balances designing
you’re designing within it.”
furniture and judging superyachts with residential design
and a healthy dose of cabaret and camp on the side, Tim
has become one of Tim’s signatures.
Gosling is perhaps best described as an artistic polymath.
more recently, his twenty-two-room French chateâu—
seems to run in the family.
which hosted President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his
“My father was a scientist obsessed with genes,” Tim
troops during the invasion of Normandy in World War II—
says rather modestly (in truth, his father, Raymond, was
Tim is constantly reinventing and reshaping spaces with a
an accomplished researcher and scientific pioneer, whose
nod to their historical past as well as future preservation.
work was crucial to unlocking the code of both DNA and
RNA, helping to establish the modern field of genetics
what you’re looking at—the beauty, the bone structure. I
particularly know much about art, but he appreciated it
feel very much like a custodian on this journey.”
nevertheless because his parents—Tim’s grandparents—
were passionate about it.
Yacht Show, held in September, Tim proves that blazing trails in emerging fields remains a family trait.
and say, ‘Right, go through the gallery, find your favorite
oil painting and then come back and describe it to me, and
get to creating a space and a structure that responds to
From there, he became fascinated with drawing
the outside environment,” he says. “Over the past ten
and painting everything in his line of sight, from London
years, that world has found its own voice and its own
landmarks like St. Paul’s Cathedral to favorite works like
consciousness—not just by replicating domestic interiors,
Sir Joshua Reynolds’ famous “Angels’ Heads” portrait,
but by applying a new level of technicality and design that
which depicts a then five-year-old Lady Frances Gordon
is specific to the curves and waterline. You aren’t just on
Eventually those innate powers of
the ocean—you’re seeing and experiencing and interacting
observation landed Tim in art school, where he began
with seas and islands. God knows what we’ll be able to do
honing his own vision and expanding his creative palate.
“Yachts, and specifically superyachts, are so exciting
to me because they are literally the closest thing we
I will buy you the poster,’ ” Tim recalls.
in cherubic form.
Then there’s his work designing and dissecting
superyachts. As a repeat judge at the annual Monaco
“When I was a child—around six or seven years old—
my grandmother used to take me to the National Gallery,
“It’s a really strange mix of emotions,” Tim says, “the
whole idea of trying to tame a thing, to really understand
as we know it today). By Tim’s account, his father didn’t
From designing
furniture to restoring his circa 1787 home in London and,
His talent for universality comes naturally—in fact it
Fast forward a couple of decades, and that approach
twenty years from now!”
“I can’t separate the space I’m in from how I live in
it and that was always true—as a child, in boarding school
In the end, it’s that promise of possibility that fuels
Tim Gosling the most: pushing boundaries to create
and later at art school,” he says. “It’s always about taking
inspired worlds within spaces. “Landscape is an enormous
the architecture back to its truest form and then deciding
factor in creation, whether it’s a building or a boat,” he says.
how to either follow it or play against it—something that’s
“And that feeling of connecting with the environment
as true when you’re sketching a structure as it is when
around you is, well, really quite a bit of magic, isn’t it?”
THE CURRENT VOL. 2 109
MEDITERRANEAN SEA OFF THE COAST OF MONACO T U E S D AY, S E P T E M B E R 2 4 , 2 0 1 9 3:38PM