Haunting Ashton Court

When Jack first approached us with the nascent seeds of this project, we quickly formed some key aesthetic roots that would underpin it: collage (in the sense of archive), threads, fragments, gatekeeping and decay, amongst others. We also had a strong predetermined idea of the importance of the book’s breadth and appeal: it should be engaging and accessible to anyone and everyone, and therefore it needed to play aesthetically with a subversion of the ideas of gatekeeping—both academic and social.

To quote the text that adorns its back cover, Haunting Ashton Court is an “invitation to join us in thinking differently about history: which stories make the cut, who is given permission to tell them, and how we might re-shape them.” In response to this ideology, our cover design centres around eerie, floating abstract forms—like burned paper fragments of artefacts from the project—held captive by chains around a graphical motif of a gateway or window (both ghostly portal and uncrossable threshold). Typographically, the typeface of the title (the Upstairs) theatrically enunciates this spectral essence, and that sense of both theatre (literal or otherwise) is reinforced with the fluid, alternate-heavy strokes of Orpheus Pro, which attempts a contemporary visual translation of historical, calligraphic letterforms—seen here as the book’s subtitle and throughout the book on title pages.

The triptych structure of the book was an exciting challenge to design, and we attempted to use subtle visual pointers throughout to make its use as intuitive and immersive as possible to its potential users: each of the three main sections—commissions, script, toolkit—are delineated by a different palette, and each section is interspersed and bookended by the full-bleed imagery (often the wonderful photography of Maria Meco Sanchez).