Ab Rogers is a London-based designer known for a wide-ranging practice informed by his lyrical imagination. In 2004, he founded Ab Rogers Design (ARD), now an established studio that plays with colour, materials and function to inject a sense of poetry, magic and wonder into the everyday world.
He was Head of Programme for the MA Interior design course at the Royal College of Art from 2012 – 2015, following extensive teaching at the Leeds Metropolitan University, Parsons Institute of Design in New York, Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow and Eindhoven Design Academy, Netherlands.
ARD’s multifaceted work includes designing for hotels, restaurants, retail environments, domestic interiors, museum exhibitions, websites and brands; past clients include the Pompidou Centre, Tate Modern, Royal Academy, Science Museum, the Australian Centre for Moving Image, Selfridges, Conde Nast, Pizza Express, Price Waterhouse Cooper and Scape Living, for whom they have designed student housing schemes at Mile End, Shoreditch, Guildford and Melbourne. New sites are planned for Brisbane, Brighton and Dublin.
For a house in London, the studio conjured rainbow-coloured spiral staircases and playground slides linking one storey to the next. A Mayfair clothing shop - Emperor Moth - became a mirrored crystal cave in which automated mannequins slowly gyrate. Rogers even took on the staid Little Chef roadside eatery, giving every uniform and ceiling tile a playful new reason for existing.
A former cabinet-maker and sailor, Rogers earned his MA in design from the Royal College of Art, where he met Shona Kitchen, with whom he cofounded Kitchen Rogers Design (KRD) in 1997. Kitchen and Rogers' projects included the Comme des Garçons store in Paris, the Al-Ostoura luxury department store in Kuwait City, and the Michel Guillon flagship store in London.