A converted carriage house at the back of De Beauvoir Workshops. Two floors of rare fashion and art books, original artworks, esoterica. Flora Gau is calling it a purveyor of spells, books and art objects.
The address is Studio 9, 69A Southgate Road. The neighbourhood sits on the quiet edge of Hackney where Islington loses its grip. You walk past sash windows and a hand-painted sign and step into a room of monochrome and chrome. Mitchell + Corti designed the interior. Wood floors that creak in the right way. A low bed-like sofa in the centre. Black benches under the shelves.
Gau spent the last five years curating the Alaïa Bookstore in London, a small annex of the late designer's vision for the discipline. Before that she ran Claire de Rouen, the photography and fashion bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Studio Nocturne is the first space she has built for herself. The thinking shows in every detail.
The collection
On the back table this week sits Diane Keaton's Reservations, a 1980 photo book of hotel lobbies the actress slept in through the seventies. Beside it, a 1933 monograph of André Kertész's Distortion nudes, taken with a funhouse mirror lifted from a Parisian amusement park. A small painting by the New Jersey artist Danielle McKinney leans against the wall, a woman in repose, lit from a single source. Gau buys the things she actually wants to live with.
The fashion shelves run heavy on monographs and out-of-print reference. Bouts of Helmut Lang archive ephemera. A run of British Vogue from the early Grace Coddington years. Gau's interest tilts toward the documentary edge of the discipline, the books that record the working life of a studio rather than the finished campaign.
Esoterica fills the lower shelves. Teri King's Love, Sex and Astrology. A pile of small pamphlets on tarot, herbalism, dream interpretation. The mix is deliberate. Gau treats fashion as a craft that runs alongside other crafts of attention.
I wanted to create the community space I was looking for, but also create the space with my community as well.
Flora Gau, to Margaux DelacroixThe room
Mitchell + Corti, who are friends of Gau, kept the volumes tight. The central sofa converts into a long table. The benches pull up alongside it for dinner. A book signing held last month for the stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington's new photography collection turned the back of the room into a salon. The space wants to be used.
The aesthetic is gothic in the lowercase sense. Chrome shelving against painted black. Wood underfoot. A low ceiling that makes the act of browsing feel private. The internet flattened the social life of the bookshop years ago. A room like this offers the slower form back.
Studio Nocturne interior, designed by Mitchell + Corti. Photograph: Studio Nocturne, via Wallpaper*
The lineage
London has been short on this kind of bookshop for a while. Claire de Rouen closed its Charing Cross Road premises in 2019. The Alaïa Bookstore, run inside the New Bond Street boutique, kept the conversation going. Studio Nocturne picks up the thread and carries it east. Gau has the memory of both rooms in her hands. She has built something that reads like a private library opened to the public. The hours are by appointment from Tuesday, walk-in on Saturdays.