The DRAMA! Hannah Crowell sets the stage 🖼️

February 20, 2025

Photo credit: Hannah Crowell
In this image: Glamour Break Diva (#2) by Ruben Natal-San Miguel

Superstar designer Hannah Crowell has an objective: “allow for your life to happen as it will, but to make as artful and colorful and comfortable a place as possible for it all to unfold within”. The Hannah Crowell Design Studio office is the perfect embodiment of the firm’s ethos, resplendent with a collection of art and ephemera that’s made her space into a living collage.

We asked the designer, whose wide-ranging projects are regularly featured in national and international media outlets like Architectural Digest and Casa Vogue, about her approach to collecting art.

What's the first piece of art you can remember buying for yourself?

What's the first piece of art you can remember buying for yourself? I was fortunate to grow up in an art collecting family—not necessarily high value pieces, but art from fellow artists in the community and a lot of folk art. So, by the time I was out on my own, I had a small collection of pieces they gifted me, or that I managed to sneak into a suitcase when I was home for a visit. But the first piece of art I ever bought for myself is still hanging in my home. It was from a little antique store in Oakland, and it was $40, which was more money than I had to my name at the time. I was with my godmother, and she told me to tell the shopkeeper that my husband would kill me if I spent that much (I was a baby at the time and very much not married!) on art, and he gave it to me for $25. I suspect it was more out of pity for the awkward 20 year-old girl from Tennessee who was married to a man who hated art.

Photo credit: Hannah Crowell
In these images: The moment is now by Fares Micue; A Genuine Fishing Smack, a 20x200 Vintage Edition

What personally draws you to a piece of art? What is your process of seeing?

I am more drawn to photography because of its realness, especially candid portraits. One of my favorite pieces from 20x200 that I have used several times, including in our studio, is Glamour Break Diva #2 by Ruben Natal-San Miguel. I love images that capture a subject’s unmasked self and the realness that comes with that. Those are the ones that are the most interesting and powerful to me.

We love that your work not only celebrates your clients’ personal assortments of art objects, books, and knickknacks, but makes them a critical design element. How do you go about adding art you’ve sourced into these collections?

I love that you see that and appreciate that aspect of my work because I think it truly makes a space; it’s the jewelry. And in truth, there is really no rhyme or reason to it. I buy a lot of random objects and accessories at a few antique stores in Nashville that I love, and at The Mart Collective in Santa Monica, I always find treasures. I could spend hours in weird Etsy wormholes looking for vintage scuba helmets to use on a bookcase or old oil paintings of dogs to prop in a room. Really, if it’s interesting and quirky, I get it, knowing it will have a home one day.

Your background is in both Art History and Theater, and you have a long history working in the performing arts. In what ways is designing a residential interior akin to theatrical set design?

It is very similar in that you are setting the scene, be it on a stage or someone’s living room. It’s the backdrop for the story of the lives that the people in the home will tell, and the tone of that space informs everything. The spaces that we live in should are a reflection of ourselves and, at times, a reflection of the self we want to be. Either way, the goal is to create a space that tells the story of that life in a way that is inspiring and joyful.

Photo credit: Hannah Crowell
In these images: Untitled (My bad) by Mike Monteiro; Animal Locomotion: Plate 659 (Mule) by Eadweard Muybridge; Plate 22, Sheet 6, Ancient Courses Mississippi River Meander Belt by Harold Fisk

What’s a favorite project of yours in which you incorporated 20x200 art?

The Late Great Speakeasy at the Virgin Hotel would certainly be at the top. The art for that project is 90% of what makes that space as unique as it is, and it's one that I am really proud of. The other would be our River House project. I had a two-story stairwell with a lot of white wall that we turned into a massive art installation, and it was probably my favorite part of that project.