The Current, Vol. 2: Tim Gosling

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