Left Norden leads design teams in both the UK and Hong Kong.
REPORTER 027
PROFILE Tina Norden
Conran and Partners won the Interior Design Practice prize at the 2023 FX Awards. Here, the firm’s partner and principal talks about that ‘mind-blowing’ achievement, a preference for style over fashion, and a love for interior design
WORDS BY EMILY MARTIN
TINA NORDEN is an interior designer and architect who boasts an impressively diverse portfolio of projects, which stretch across many contexts and continents, from hotel and restaurant design to high-end residential and boutique retail projects. As partner and principal at Conran and Partners, Norden leads the practice’s design teams in both the UK and Hong Kong and was instrumental in building the team in Asia. She joined the practice in 1997 and says her CV is ‘very short’, since Conran and Partners is the only practice she has worked at since graduating. She believes in style over fashion to ensure the result is timeless and remains fresh. She has a focus on hospitality, with her extensive experience aligning with deep-rooted practice principles. Last November, Conran and Partners was announced as the Interior Design Practice 2023 winner at the FX Awards. I speak to Norden about her work, life at the practice, love for interior design, and winning what she describes as a milestone accolade. ‘I think that was probably one of the most
exciting awards for us really,’ says Norden, reflecting on the practice’s FX Award. ‘I mean, we’ve won many awards for projects and that’s amazing. But I think something that actually is about us as a practice, our ethos, our people and the work that we’ve done over a period of time is mind-blowing. That’s really an amazing accolade to get from our end, our industry and
you know, particularly given the fact that our management takeover was just at the end of the year before.’
Since 2016 Norden has been a member
of the Conran and Partners board. She talks about her enjoyment of working with team members, and describes it as a truly multidisciplinary practice. While qualifying as a ‘fully fledged architect’, Norden says she found love in interior design: ‘It felt that interior design is faster moving, faster paced, which suits me and I enjoy that a lot. And you also you get an opportunity to get deep into projects much earlier; I was running little projects on site when I was quite junior and quite inexperienced, but because the projects are smaller – you know there’s less money at stake – there’s more opportunity to kind of get into all of the different stages. Much quicker than maybe architecture.’ It’s easy to see the passion and delight interior design brings her, which she says is more people-centric. Nevertheless, working as a designer at Conran and Partners has ensured Norden utilises all her acquired skills, a quality that has kept her at the practice for over a quarter of a century. ‘It’s all kind of under one holistic umbrella,’
she adds. ‘So, I really enjoy that aspect. [When I first joined the practice] I was really at a very junior level, but I was thrown in straight at the deep end by working on a big architecture
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