Welcome to Hot Cottage, the jack of all trades design studio that zigzags between methods and mediums

Hot Cottage is just one of the many creative companies led by Ed Davis, who is also the mastermind behind contemporary men’s fashion and graphic art project Ecstatic Research, the creative collective and streetwear brand Brain Dead, the incense brand Agaric Fly (which he runs with his son Milo Davis). And, last but not least, Hot Cottage, a creative studio working across art direction, graphic design, identity, branding, campaigns, publishing, exhibition design and creative strategy – like Ed, it’s a jack of all trades, which he runs with partners Rob Cordiner and Olivia Radonich.

Naturally, Hot Cottage is behind the branding of many of the aforementioned projects (in a way, it’s like Hot Cottage was built to power its founders’ products with forward thinking design), but its portfolio also includes an identity for the cafe Pantry and album art work for Lauer. The design processes behind these identities begins with research and collecting, from libraries and image and typography archives, gathering reference images, objects and ideas and bringing them together through collage, drawing and graphic design. With Agaric Fly’s logo type, Hot Cottage applies that collage ethos with two drastically different letterforms, paired with hand-drawn illustrations. For work on the magazine Local Optimist, their book design ethos follows in the same footsteps, bombing the cover with glittery stickers and creating spreads of illustrative collages.

“We all grew up at a distance from subcultural centres, staying connected through magazine subscriptions and eventually the internet,” says Rob. “Design and creative practice enabled us to get closer and become active participants in the scenes that had inspired us.” Flowing through the stylistic soups of countless inspirations, such as Margaret Calvert, Mike Kelley, David Lynch and Tadanori Yokoo, the studio’s work is constantly propelled by discovery and curiosity, with no signs of stopping and staying on any one project.