Collecting as a Love Language: The Making of Time & Space

Before Time & Space existed publicly, it lived quietly between two people. In the years before a physical space took shape, there was just Armand Da Silva and Tyler Phoenix, wandering markets, swapping gifts, discovering the thrill of a found object. Their first date was not in a bar, but at a mid-century modern fair in Dulwich, the kind of beginning that feels like foreshadowing. They walked the room slowly, moving between chairs and lamps as if already curating something together. They didn’t know it then, but they were collecting a future, one object at a time.

What started as a shared instinct grew into a private archive. Books, chairs, lamps, and small treasures discovered through travel and late-night eBay searches. A Harvey Guzzini mushroom lamp, Pirelli calendars with pages soft from age, auctions won for almost nothing, all collected for no reason other than appreciation or their future home. They didn’t yet have a space, but they were building one in spirit, gathering pieces as a love language and storing them for a life they were still imagining.

Their travels shaped their vision. A trip to Japan led them to Wonderwall Inc, a studio known for its meticulous, boundary-pushing approach to design. Initially, visits weren’t allowed, but after sharing their work and demonstrating a mutual passion for design via Instagram, they were welcomed into the office, where conversations and observation of the studio’s ethos left a lasting impression. Later, in Los Angeles, Armand and Tyler found themselves drawn to hybrid spaces that blurred the line between home, gallery, and shop. Same Old LA and Found Objects felt youthful and alive, where you could sit down, read, touch the furniture, and hold pieces while talking about design. It showed them what a space could be when design wasn’t behind glass, and what London was missing. On the flight home, the thought stayed with them: what if we created a place like that? What if we stopped collecting just for ourselves?

In May 2022, they opened their first studio in London Fields, a shared space with their friend Sage, who at the time was building what would become Sage Nation. It was intimate, improvised, but full of life. A soft launch with friends led to open days that felt more like gatherings. Photographers came to borrow chairs, stylists pulled lamps for sets, musicians lounged on sofas during long conversations about design and work in the industry. People didn’t rush; they stayed. It felt like a home disguised as a studio, or a studio disguised as a home.

As Time & Space grew, the furniture began to circulate, chairs, lamps, and objects travelling through studios and shoots, picking up new stories before finding their way back home. With that came the realities of running a rental-facing archive: contracts, repairs, conversations about damage and care, learning what it means to let go of control without losing sentiment. After a year, Armand, Tyler, and Sage naturally outgrew the shared studio, parting ways amicably as Sage moved fully into fashion and they leaned deeper into interiors. Not long after, their son Angelo was born, a pause that re-centred their purpose.

They returned in February 2024 with clarity and a new home for Time & Space, this time in Deptford. Bigger, slower, more rooted. A place for books on shelves, for chairs that invite you to sit rather than admire from a distance. A living archive. When you step inside, you feel the romance of objects that have lived. The bold red Chadwick Modular Sofa by Don Chadwick, which shifts form depending on how people stage it. Two yellow Kangaroo Chairs by Ernst Moeckl, carried on the Eurostar post-Brexit after being found in Paris, border staff baffled by the bubble-wrapped silhouettes. The Componibili units by Anna Castelli, orange and green, bought from a woman who explained that her father gifted them as a wedding present decades ago. Pieces that carry human fingerprints as much as design history.

Some finds were small miracles: a Bang & Olufsen TV won on eBay for the price of a dinner, a Herman Miller truck found for £20, the BeoSound 9000 CD player they searched for years before finally securing. Others found them by chance. Each acquisition is intuitive, less about rarity than feeling, a quiet thrill when the right object arrives at the right time.

But perhaps the most significant thing Time & Space offers isn’t the furniture; it’s the atmosphere. Armand remembers walking into showrooms and feeling people decide what he could and couldn’t afford before he even spoke. Time & Space was built to be the opposite. A space where curiosity is welcomed. A space where design isn’t elitist, but communal. Where someone can come just to look. Where someone is given space to fall in love with a chair, or a book, or a collection of Kewpie babies.

The plan isn’t to scale for the sake of scale. Expansion here means depth: more community, more conversation, more events that blur the line between living room and showroom. A future where someone might come in to view a Louis Vuitton trunk, or join a design talk, and leave with a story, or a friend, or a newfound fascination with the objects around them. Time & Space is not content to simply be a repository of remarkable objects. In 2026, the space will host a series of activations, launches, talks, workshops, and more, offering visitors the chance to engage with design in new and unexpected ways. It is a space built on curiosity and shared passion, and it continues to invite a wider community to experience the stories behind the objects.

Time & Space is, ultimately, a reminder that objects hold meaning because people hold them, in homes, in memories, in transit across borders. That good design is not just to be viewed, but experienced. That some collections begin as love stories, and remain love stories, even as they evolve into something public, shared, and quietly influential.



Photography by Ivory Campbell for Something Curated