Sandra
Douglas, designer
Sandra
DouglasSandra
Douglas was born in Crawley, West Sussex, and educated at Rochester
grammar school, followed by a foundation course at Canterbury
College of Art. Sandra's project for her finals, the visionary
concept of a cinema installed within a disused gasometer, gained her
a first. She died of breast cancer in 2010, aged 51.
In the
1980s, Sandra Douglas, worked at Ben Kelly Design in London, where
she was closely involved in projects including the Haçienda
nightclub in Manchester, for Factory Records and the band New Order.
The Haçienda and two other Manchester projects for Factory, the Dry
201 bar and the label's headquarters, had a deeply radical influence
on the discipline of interior design. Although now demolished, the
Haçienda is still used by design students as a case study.
Joining the museum designers MET Studio in 1991, Sandra brought a
fresh and gutsy rawness to exhibition design. She introduced a
much-needed sense of architectural rigour to the projects, making
one think differently about telling stories spatially, as witnessed
by her work on the Water Gallery for the National Museum of Science
and Industry in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. In 1995, she worked on a
commission to convert L'Olympic, a cinema dating from 1927 in
Nantes, France, into a club and venue.
Sandra finally settled
at the design practice Johnson Naylor in London, where she was a
powerful creative force. Always drawing on her deep interest in the
visual arts (she couldn't walk past Tate Modern without running in
for a look), she worked on a huge range of projects.
Sandra
had a wonderful knack of making friends, who loved her great sense
of fun, her vivaciousness, her courage and her spirited ability to
hold an opinion on just about anything. Even in her last days she
made an impact. The abstract paintings she created, and kept with
her in her room at Trinity hospice in Clapham, south-west London,
are now going to be reproduced on cards for the benefit of the
charity.
She is survived by her daughter, Raye, her mother,
Jeanette, and her brothers Malcolm and Keith. Her father, Alec, died
in 2007.
