Like most bibliophiles, Flora Gau’s obsession with books began young. It started with a children's book her parents bought her at the Dalí Museum, before expanding to an illustrated history of art in general. ‘I was looking at that book every night trying to learn all the art movements,’ Gau says. ‘It became very addictive, and that’s how it started. At night, I wasn’t sleeping. I was just thinking about the pages of those art books.’
That obsession has shaped Flora’s career, from her role as the former director at the specialist photography and fashion bookshop Claire de Rouen Books and curator of the Alaïa Bookstore, to, now, the founder of Studio Nocturne, a ‘purveyor of spells, books and art objects’ in London’s De Beauvoir neighbourhood.
‘Spells, books and art objects’: Inside Studio Nocturne
Located in a converted carriage house, Studio Nocturne is a two-floor space that has the rickety wood-planked floors and snug environs you would associate with a cosy bookshop, but reconfigured by the monochrome-and-chrome-heavy interiors designed by Mitchell + Corti for a minimalist, gothic aesthetic.
It’s a balance between the welcoming and mysterious that reflects Gau’s mission for the space – to create a vast wunderkammer of rare and strange printed matter designed for those who know how to appreciate it. Treasures inside include Diane Keaton’s Reservations, the photography book she published in 1980 with images of the hotel lobbies she stayed in throughout the 70s; a collection of André Kertész’s Distortion nudes, photographed in the 1930s using a funhouse mirror from a Parisian amusement park; and paintings by the contemporary New Jersey-based artist Danielle McKinney, a favourite of Gau’s for her atmospheric depictions of women captured in solitary moments of repose and contemplation.
For Gau, the books are the catalyst for a larger social project. 'I wanted to create the community space I was looking for, but also create the space with my community as well,’ she says. Friends Mitchell + Corti designed a low, bed-like sofa in the middle of the space, where visitors can gather during the day and get a 360-degree view of the rare art, design and fashion books, original artworks by contemporary artists, and vintage esoteric tomes like Teri King’s Love, Sex and Astrology that line the walls. Underneath the shelves are black benches, and in the back a large black table, laid out with Gau’s rotating selection of noteworthy pieces from her collection.
For events, the central sofa can be converted into a table with the benches pulled up alongside it to create a baquent-style table for dinner parties, or the back table can be used as a space for book signings, as it recently was for the launch of stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington's new photography collection, one of Gau’s many friends from the fashion world whose work is present within the space.
If part of the pleasure of reading is the intertwining of your mind with the author's to unite two visions into one, the pleasure of the space like Studio Nocturne is that it expands the radius of that dialogue even further, encompassing not just you and the creatives whose work you discover inside pages, but those you interact with outside of them as well. It's the kind of place the internet has usurped, but, at least among those who love print, has never surpassed – an hour inside reveals a wealth of artists, subcultures, philosophies you never knew existed, but which, like a kid with her first art book, you’ll be obsessing over.
Studio 9, De Beauvoir Workshops, 69A Southgate Rd, London N1 3JS.