Designing From Home
Designing From Home is a new short documentary film co-directed by Harriet Atkinson and Sue Breakell and produced by Banyak Films, which explores the north London house where influential graphic designer FHK Henrion (1914-1990) lived and worked for over forty years, and features interviews with his four children alongside original archive material from Henrion’s archive at the University of Brighton Design Archives. Its primary focus is on the complex meanings of home for Henrion, a German-Jewish émigré who arrived in London in 1936, having fled Germany for Paris in 1933. The film is winner of the award for Best Short Documentary at the London Independent Film Festival 2026.
You can watch the trailer here. And for more information about the project, click here.
A screening of this informative and surprisingly poignant film will be followed by an ‘in conversation’ between its directors, Harriet Atkinson and Sue Breakell and Insiders/Outsiders founding director Monica Bohm-Duchen as well as a Q&A.
Dr Harriet Atkinson (h.atkinson2@brighton.ac.uk) is a historian of art and design at University of Brighton’s Centre for Design History. She leads University of Brighton’s MA Curating Collections and Heritage in collaboration with Brighton and Hove Museums. Her recent research focuses on propaganda and protest design, published as Showing Resistance: propaganda and modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 (Manchester University Press, 2024, Winner, 2026 Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period 1800-1960) and she is the director of the documentary film Art on the Streets (2023).
Dr Sue Breakell (S.M.Breakell@brighton.ac.uk) is Archive Director and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Brighton Design Archives, and co-leads the Museums, Archives, Exhibitions strand of the University’s Centre for Design History. Recent research centres on archives as subject and method in art and design history. She co-edited (with Wendy Russell) The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context (Routledge, 2023).
To book, click here
Image: FHK Henrion and Daphne Hardy Henrion in the garden of their home in Hampstead, c.1947. Photograph by Anneli Bunyard, courtesy Estate of Anneli Bunyard.
