Decorex 2026 - INTRODUCING the vip lounge

When Decorex asked me to design the VIP Lounge for 2026, I knew immediately what I didn't want to build. Not an arrangement of sofas to rest in between appointments, pleasant and quickly forgotten. I wanted to build a home inside an exhibition hall. And I knew at once which home it should be. The chalet.

It is the one kind of building that asks you to slow down. It rewards you for staying longer than you meant to. It holds you inside while you feel everything outside, the timber under your hand, a fire at the centre of the room, the weather at the walls. That is the idea behind Back to the Future — The Chalet Reimagined.

Not nostalgia. Reinterpretation

The title arrived early, but it isn't really the title of a lounge. It's how I've always worked. In every project I begin by looking back, at how people lived, at what earlier makers invented to solve problems we've long since forgotten we had. Then I look forward, and adapt those ideas for the way we live now.

I had no interest in recreating a traditional chalet, and just as little in designing what I sometimes call a luxury hotel that happens to be in the mountains. One repeats history. The other ignores it. This lounge is my attempt at a third way: familiar alpine references handled in unfamiliar ways, traditional craftsmanship sitting easily alongside contemporary engineering, natural materials expressed through new techniques rather than imitated.

There's a second reference at work, and I want to be precise about it. The lounge draws on the glamour of the European Alps in the 1970s, the world caught in the ski photography of that era. But look closely at those photographs and the glamour has nothing to do with wealth. It's the luxury of enjoying life: being outdoors all day, around a table all evening, dressing with care because the occasion deserved it, not because anyone was watching. A richness measured in time and pleasure, not money.

I don't design rooms. I design rituals

Before I think about materials or furniture, I want to understand something else entirely: where does everyone naturally gather, where is the first coffee taken, which chair does someone reach for at the end of the day. The plan comes first, then atmosphere, then materials. Individual pieces find their place only after that.

It's why the arrival was designed before the seating. Guests enter through a shimmering metal curtain, made by the Catalan house KriskaDECOR, who happen to be marking their centenary in the very year of this lounge, a maker turning one hundred at the heart of a project about honouring the past while stepping into the future. To arrive through it is to be unveiled into the room rather than simply to walk into it.

And everything in the plan follows from the fire. Suspended and sculptural at the centre of the room, with seating gathered around it in the round, exactly as it was in the great conversation pits of the 1970s. Place the fire, and the room arranges itself.

Materials chosen for how they age, not how they photograph

The walls could have been lined in reclaimed timber and called it a day. Instead I wanted them to carry the atmosphere through texture and colour, reinterpreting familiar materials rather than copying them. Leather and silk wallcoverings alongside wood-effect surfaces that catch the warmth of aged alpine boards without adding another plank of solid timber. A palette drawn from forests, stone, weathered timber, winter skies and firelight, never from a passing trend.

The same instinct runs through the rug underfoot, hand-knotted by a Portuguese house that has spent nearly eighty years refining the tradition, and through the carved mouldings that anchor the room in real craft rather than in a contemporary gesture set loose from its history. If the room is going to look forward with any confidence, something in it has to hold the past steady.

What I hope people feel

More than anything, I hope this lounge gives a sense of how I think. I don't begin with style, I begin with lifestyle. I don't decorate rooms, I create places where memories unfold.

The success of an interior is never measured by how beautifully it photographs. It's measured by how deeply it's remembered.

Back to the Future — The Chalet Reimagined is Claudia Dorsch's VIP Lounge for Decorex 2026, opening at Kensington Olympia this October.