Shopping bag.

The term eagle-eyed finds new meaning in curator and retail guru, Alex Eagle. Cool, collectable and oh, so chic, she even lives laterally – and this week she lets us into her carefully curated home and studio. Known for her eponymous store, Alex Eagle Studio, in Soho, and her collection of conceptual shopping experiences; The Store – in London, Oxfordshire and Berlin – it is clear upon meeting Alex in her natural habitat – a loft apartment above the busy streets of Soho – that there is a reason her opinion and her careful selections are some of the most coveted in the creative industries, that conveniently seem to unify in the spaces that she so carefully creates.

Whether it be the perfect placement of a plant pot, or the designing of her own products, the logic with which Alex navigates every decision is seemingly signified by the attention to detail that she applies to every space she is entrusted with, which – exemplified perfectly in the towering cactus in the corner that has been playfully reimagined as a hatstand – always seems to see her deconstruct the familiar to reimagine it as something different or to understand it in a different context.

Now the namesake designer of her own luxury clothing and homewares, that are utilitarian in intention “with an actual functionality to them” but still of the highest quality in nature, Alex is uninterested in designing clothes to the restraints and deadlines of the typical fashion calendar. Instead, she seeks out longevity and strives to find it in the highest quality design and materials, taking the time to ensure that every aspect is perfect before the item is offered for sale for an indefinite amount of time.

Alex’s eagle eye developed as a buyer for Joseph, refining her know-how with stints at Harper’s Bazaar and Tank Magazine, before developing her space in Soho, London, an inviting design and retail oasis on its slicked streets. Alex lays out a path of instructions to her devotees, on how to curate your own luxurious living space. It’s one Alex has toiled over since she was little, when her mother would find her in her bedroom, moving around all her furniture in the middle of the night, “with a very serious face…. Until the next week where I’d move it all around again. I always liked seeing things in a fresh way.”

Alex’s style obeys a few simple laws; it is less about the things you accumulate than it is about the life of those things: “Often there’s no need to change things in life, you can work with what you have.” Alex’s knack for curation obeys a logic of minimalism, imbuing items with a new lease under new light or surroundings. It is this Kondo-like sense of wonder for the simple that gives, in Alex’s words, “so much joy.” The ‘feel’ of things lies at the core of Alex’s concept; her store mimics the pleasure of nosing the shelves of an especially chic friend’s collectables.

Eagle found her own so coveted that she would sell them on to friends, coffee tables, mirrors, and keepsakes: “I just recognised that this was something that I really enjoyed and that maybe it was something that people really liked, this idea of shopping for furniture or art while shopping for clothes or being inspired by glasses by having an actual drink, shopping from a home. So I moved my flat into a shop!” But by setting it in a retail environment, it loses the frisson of discovery. To foster a warm feeling, and allow one to linger, is “really important”, as is having “no hard sell.”