Feeling SMUG with founder Lizzie Evans

Enter the Smug emporium on Camden Passage, and you will find a world that makes Steptoe’s house look as plain as a doctor’s waiting room. A place where startled wooden owls peer down from the roof, and stuffed chickens pop out of tarnished antique drawers. Islingtonite and SMUG founder Lizzie Evans was born to run this design hub. An eclectic mix of glassware, kitchen fodder, 50s furniture and handmade toys, it’s the perfect place for the ‘thinking couple’s’ Valentine’s shopping. It’s a department store, without the departments (or the soulless consumerism).

As I wind up the three floors to Lizzie’s office, each level invites you into a new shop of curiosity. At first glance, the basement could be the haven of a Stepford wife, but the sly ‘blahblahblah’ scrawled on the cushions tell another story. The second floor is Bedknobs and Broomsticks with style. Between the primary coloured spatulas sit toys made from Christmas jumpers. The third invites us to peruse the print work of London’s greatest young designers. It is known as ‘the pop up print shop', designed like a 60s record store to let shoppers flick through affordable art at their leisure. The shop displays work from the Lodeveans’ Collection, an enterprise run by Lizzie’s father and brother.  

Sitting at her oversized wood desk, surrounded by trinkets, Lizzie looks as though she’s jumped through the pages of a Puffin book. It’s quite fitting, then, that it was children’s story Mrs Wobble the Waitress that led her to a life of interior design. “I remember the character wobbling and getting the sack, then her children and her husband saying, ‘well let’s turn your house into a restaurant’. When they did it all up, I was very excited about it, even when I was six years old. I wanted to do up spaces and turn them into something different,” she says. “I found that I wasn’t as good at drawing as I wanted to be. So I ended up making things - lots of sewing and crafting things out of wood”.

Growing up in Canonbury, Lizzie was just a stroll away Camden Passage, and as even as a teenager she spent fistfuls of pocket money on unusual furniture and design pieces. As she explains, renting a shop on the famed throughway happened almost by accident: “I was brought in to design the building and ended up renting three floors!”

Having lived her whole life in the Islington area, Lizzie is a seasoned expert on the local boutiques. “I have always loved twentytwentyone (in Angel), and Peanut Vendor, which is a home wares store on Newington Green. We’re also friends with the vintage clothes shop Fat Faced Cat (Camden Passage). Its nice growing up here, it’s like a little village.”

At just 27, she has already carved out a multifaceted career, hopping from interior architecture to graphic designer to specialist retailer. But as owner of SMUG, she has become a new breed of philanthropist, cheerleading talented young designers like Matthew Pugh and Donna Wilson, by providing an accessible outlet for London creatives. “I try not to pick too many of one thing,” she says. “I like to pick and choose. I try to get designers that aren’t at all established yet, but a lot aren’t at the stage where they can sell wholesale. We feel quite strongly that we don’t ever want customers to pay more to get [their products] from SMUG.”

As a store, SMUG is near impossible to pigeonhole. Decorated in retro toys and furniture that spans decades, it’s something of an unpretentious misfit. “We’ve been called a ‘concept boutique’,” says Lizzie, “but all that really is, is a department store, and we’re quite small.” SMUG may be a muddle of modern, vintage and childlike quirk, but it’s far removed from the bric a brac gift shops that crowd the West End. Every corner of the building is carefully considered, right down the rusty manhole covers on the shop floor. So what inspires her style? “I do like animals, and all of the woodland-like, hiking and winter inspired stuff. And I’ve always liked owls, so there are lots and lots of owls! Things that are classic, but with a twist.” Lizzie throws 50s chic into a blender with animal kitsch and contemporary art, throws the mixture on the walls and watches it mould into a cosy dough. Or, as she describes it, “I just never like to have a row of the same thing!”

This February, SMUG will be trumping the usual Valentines ‘lingerie’ with a range cosy, eco-sleepwear. And for the domesticated lovebirds, there will be a series of ‘his and hers’ guinea pig tea towels. Lizzie also plans to design a bespoke collection for London Design Festival (aka “Fashion Week for Designers”), should she ever find the time.

SMUG is the Islington’s interiors niche, a shop of curiosity with Lizzie at the heart of it. “I found an old, end of year thing from my sixth form recently,” she says, “one where we were supposed to say what you wanted to be doing in five years time, and I’d written I wanted to have a shop, with a little shop dog.” She may not have the little shop dog just yet, but for Lizzie Evans, it looks like all owls, aprons, and knitted ducks have fallen into place.

SMUG, 13 Camden Passage, N1 8EA, 020 7354 0253; www.ifeelsmug.com

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