Métier London Introduces an Heirloom-Worthy Home Collection

Melissa Morris launched Métier London (a Katie Holmes favorite) in 2017 with a handful of bags that would make her life on-the-go at once elegant and efficient. So when the designer and once-world traveller found herself stuck in her London flat last spring at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, she quickly turned her attention to doing the same for her home. “People always think I’m really organized, but I’m actually quite messy,” Morris tells me from her Mayfair storefront, where shelves are now lined with considered interior touches that have been hand-crafted in Italy from fine leather. “I didn’t even mean to [launch a home collection],” she admits with a laugh. “I just needed a place to put my pencils!”  

Indeed, necessity is the mother of invention for Morris: that pencil case, which is finished with brass hardware, is thin and compact but opens wide, while a trio of reversible collapsible boxes inspired by origami offered Morris a chic solution to keeping her apartment-turned-office tidy. Similarly, ultra-thin notebook covers, which house a notepad created from upcycled coffee cups in a collaboration with the paper maker G.F Smith, come with discreet pockets and a pen loop. 

But the collection doesn’t begin and end at the desk: “I wanted to bring in some fun touches, too,” she says. To that end, there are patterned playing-card cases, wine charms to easily identify glasses (equal parts playful and practical in the days of the coronavirus), and portable backgammon sets that look as elegant laid out on a table mid-game as they do rolled up. (For proof just look at the campaign, which was photographed at the design-favorite Cambridge house and art gallery Kettle’s Yard.)

While Morris has set to work on additional home items (think: super soft throws that double as wraps, due out this spring), she is already daydreaming about taking these designs, which were conceived while many of us had to shelter in place, on the road one day. (Those boxes, which can lie flat and take up virtually no space in a suitcase, will surely come as a godsend to anyone who’s experienced the agony of misplacing a piece of jewelry in a hotel.) After all, she muses, “I never want anything to feel of a moment but to feel completely timeless and work in any instance.” In other words, these heirloom-worthy pieces will carry you through a lifetime—no matter what the future may bring.