A Minute With: Mini Moderns

Meet Keith Stephenson and Mark Hampshire, the team behind the nostalgic, contemporary wallpaper and accessories brand.

Festival tableware for Magpie. Courtesy of Mini Moderns

Keith and I were both working

for a design agency when we met in 1997. Keith went on to set up his own branding agency and I joined the firm a few years later.

One day, we got a commission

to design a wallpaper for a competition, which we won, and it went in to production. It was so popular that we decided to set up our own wallpaper business and Mini Moderns was born.

We both share all the work. We're a great team; Keith does illustration and is in charge of social media and I bring my skills as a designer/maker and my understanding of business and the route to retail. We mix it all up.

This year, everybody seemed to understand what Mini Moderns was trying to do. We launched a new design called Whitby, which was immediately successful, and Festival, a range of products to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Festival of Britain. We also collaborated with the paper-cutting artist Rob Ryan this year to create his first range of wallpaper. Our customers have made 2011 really special, too; we've had some lovely feedback. People feel personally involved with our brand.

They'll quite often take

a photo of a room that they've decorated with our wallpaper and send it to us.

Right now we're also putting together our next big collection. It's going to be themed around Hanif Kureishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia. It sums up a particular time in British culture that we want to reflect: the point when the socioeconomic climate of the 1970s was just colliding with the new exuberance of the 1980s. It's about cultures mixing and different influences coming together at once. The first design will be called Camberwell Beauty.

We both have

huge memory banks. Anything can trigger an idea. People say our work is retro. It is often nostalgic. We work more like a fashion label than an interiors brand, putting together collections with specific themes. Even watching a TV documentary can spark or confirm an idea. We sometimes escape for a long weekend in New York, but we don't go for relaxation, we go for stimulation, which is just as refreshing. We switch off by switching on.

We're good at getting

each other's creative references. If Keith says: "Edwardian Psychedelia," then we both know exactly what that is and what colours to use.

We never drop anything

from our range, so it's important that everything we produce hangs together and can be mixed and matched.

We love Zoe Murphy

- she single-handedly introduced the notion of upcycling to the industry. Like us, her work is based on a retro aesthetic but she makes her pieces contemporary with her own unique decorative touches.

We also enjoy Lee Broom's work.

His work combines wit with real design excellence and it's always beautiful, too. It's a hard thing to get right.

Rob Ryan is another

of our favourites. His work is really personal and he's the nicest person in the world.

We've been described

as soft modernists. Our look is often witty and influenced by the design aesthetic of the 1950s and 1970s.

We live and work

in a new building in Camberwell, south-east London but we've furnished it as if it's a 1970s town house. We love Danish teak furniture and Scandinavian style - a simple base but with ornament layered on. Our look can be a bit bonkers.

We work in a double-height studio on the ground floor. It's in a small mews courtyard with 15 other creative businesses so it's great to be based in a supportive hub.

Our home is also

a canvas for us to test things out in - we have our own wallpaper, cushions and tableware. We live with it as well as design it.