The Elemental Concept

Why Elemental Abode?

Kat grew up in a family of creatives her father a Senior Fine Art Lecturer, her mother a textiles teacher so art, design and culture were simply the air she and her sister breathed. A creative path felt natural, though she was equally curious about how things are made, sold and understood. She later taught Graphic Design and History of Art at De Montford University, which confirmed something she had half-known since childhood: that the best work almost always comes from understanding what came before it.

Her career began in behaviour change, designing public health campaigns at the Department of Health work that turns on a single stubborn question, which is what actually makes people do things differently. The two decades since have been spent in marketing and strategy across healthcare and technology, latterly at board level, and increasingly on the sustainability side of it. She is a Chartered Environmentalist and a Fellow of ISEP, and is currently studying Sustainability at Cranfield.

What has stayed constant is an interest in the human end of it all. Climate action is usually framed as technical, and Kat's work has largely been about making it legible instead connecting the health of a place to the health of the people living in it, and treating behaviour, rather than technology, as the thing that has to shift.

Elemental Abode grew out of all of it, the childhood spent among makers, twenty years spent arguing that sustainability only works when people can see and feel it, and a lifelong love of interiors. Buying something old is the least technical climate decision a person can make, and one of the better ones. Kat believes the spaces we live in shape us, and that the most interesting rooms are made slowly, from things that have already lived. Kat also studied with Lucy Gough Interior Sylist during lockdown which brought together the moving parts of learning

Elemental Abode grew out of all of it a lifelong love of interiors, a belief that good design carries responsibility, and a conviction that the most interesting rooms are made slowly, from things that have already lived.

Tom studied Graphic Design at Lincoln, then spent the first half of his career in print, sales materials, exhibition stands, signage, screen-printed merchandise for the likes of Mercedes-Benz and Manchester United. It's unfashionable work, but it teaches you things a screen never will, how ink sits on different stock, why an object feels cheap in the hand, how much of good design is settled long before anyone sees it.

The second half has been digital. For the past six years he has worked in eCommerce most recently managing a catalogue of some eight thousand products, and before that designing packaging for a coffee and tea company. He has done most of it with his own hands along the way, the photography, the film, the writing, the unglamorous parts of running a shop that nobody notices until they're done badly.

What connects the two is a fairly simple belief: that objects communicate whether you intend them to or not, and that the ones worth keeping are honest about what they're made of. It is contextual.

At Elemental Abode, that is largely his half of it. He builds and runs the shop, photographs every piece as truthfully as he can marks, repairs and all and handles the practical business of getting something from a saleroom floor to your front door. What he looks for hasn't really changed since the print years. weight, grain, the way a thing sits in the hand and feels in your house