At gallery owner's home

Furniture is art, and vice versa

Gallery owner David Gill works with artists and designers to create art and furniture for his clients

From Elsa Klensch
CNN Style Correspondent

LONDON, England (CNN) -- London gallery owner David Gill takes his work home.

Gill, who collaborates with designers to produce furniture and art for collectors, transformed a former handbag factory near one of Britain's newest museums, the Tate Modern, into a gallery. He lives upstairs.

"My own work is really selecting. I decide what is the best out of one artist, and I manufacture it with them and put it out on the market," he explains. "I feel it's the only way to create a sculpture or furniture that really merits to be collected."

Gill's appreciation of furnishings as art is equally visible in his apartment, where a sculpture by American artist Richard Snyder doubles as a sideboard.

A sculpture by the Greek artist Takis does double duty as a light display.

	INTERACTIVE GALLERY
Practical art

"They're called signal lights," Gill says. "They are kind of provocative because they are always telling you something."

The round coffee table, with a large silver-colored frame, is the result of a two-year collaboration between Gill and French designers Garouste & Bonetti.

Nearby is something from eight decades earlier, a 1920s English chair from the collection of London couturier Norman Hartnol. Painted ice blue, it's one of Gill's favorite pieces.

"It's been with me for many years," Gill says. "I don't seem to want to part with it."

His dining room table also can be used as a buffet or as a center table. The 1940s dining-room chairs were designed by Andre Arbus and are highly collectible, Gill says.

His glowing bedroom is vintage "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"I wanted it very white, so I created this white leather headboard and base, which in fact leads all around it," Gill says. "So when you light it up, it transports you, it lifts you up."

Gill also designed the large bathroom, and carved a basin from a piece of granite. It has long benches where he says he can lie down and relax.

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Garouste & Bonetti (Kozee.decor)
Takis
Tate Modern

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