This month’s guest on The Modern House Podcast is fashion designer Charlie Casely-Hayford, who started his eponymous label with his late father, Joe Casely-Hayford OBE, aged just 22 years old. Listen to the episode here. 

Charlie, aged 34, seems to be have been destined for a career in fashion, with his parents having partnered on various trend-forming brands since they first met in the late 1970s. He recalls a childhood in which no boundaries between home and work existed, where waking up at 3am to the sound of his parents discussing different cloth samples was a regular occurrence, and trips to Paris Fashion Show constituted family holidays. 

Joe, who passed away last year, is remembered as a pioneering designer who stitched together influences from London’s subcultures, religious clothing and Savile Row tailoring into clothing that was subversive, grown-up, wearable, cool and punky all at the same time. Now carrying the baton of his father’s legacy, Charlie reflects on his father’s life and work in the episode, explaining how he has only truly comprehended the impression he made on him in the last year.

Charlie’s own starting point a designer was through art, studying first at Central St Martins, interning at the White Cube gallery and then studying Art History at the Courtauld Institute. It was at St Martins, though, that Casely-Hayford first became interested in fashion as a way to express and explore identity, and has turned his hand to styling and designing ever since.

From his home in Spitalfields, east London, which he shares with his wife, interior designer Sophie Ashby, Charlie reflects on his aesthetic, work, life, appreciation of Japanese craft and shares how he sees his retirement looking (spoiler: there’s a fair bit of chess and oil painting). Plus, as always, find out what he picked as his top three living spaces around the world. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode, and if you could rate and review us, we’d be more than grateful. As ever, happy listening.