Meet Our Next in Design Winners: Nefarious Design
Founder of Nefarious Design, Adam Knight, is focused on reconnecting people with their homes, designing spaces that look beautiful and function for everyday life
When our Next in Design 2025 winner, Adam Knight, launched Nefarious Design in 2020, he chose a name that deliberately went against expectation. ‘It came from the idea of turning negatives into positives,’ he explains. ‘So often clients feel disconnected from their homes, or frustrated by the way they function, and our role is to reframe that – to make them fall in love with their spaces again.’
Adam’s own path into interiors wasn’t linear. After initially studying food technology, he renovated his parents’ listed apartment for fun, sparking a passion that led him to the KLC School of Design. He then gained over a decade of experience in the hospitality sector, first working on global restaurant projects for Jamie Oliver before joining Corbin & King to design celebrated destinations such as The Wolseley, The Delaunay – and The Beaumont.
With Nefarious, Adam has established an ethos he calls ‘dopamine design’ – creating interiors that spark joy and feel completely personal to each client. His projects combine mid-century finds and Victorian antiques with bespoke pieces and clever high-street solutions, always tailored to budget but never compromising on soul. Collaboration is key: ‘Clients become part of Nefarious,’ he says. ‘Together, we build homes that reflect their stories and bring them joy.’
3 Key Design Rules with Nefarious Design
1. The Client Inspires the Design
One of the most important design rules for all of our projects is that the client is the main inspiration. That could be yourself, or it could be a brand, but essentially the most unique thing within a home is you. Each of us has different personalities, grows up with different life experiences, and likes and dislikes different things, and that should be really brought into the interiors. I believe that dopamine design is really important. What brings you joy specifically? That could be using colors that give you flashbacks to certain memories, like your dad’s favorite tie color – use that on the joinery. Or you could use a piece of art that has been handed down as color inspiration for different rooms, or even the whole house.
2. Personality and Planning
With the original plans for a room, the more interesting the plan, the easier it is to create an interesting space. If you are just given a square box and you add furniture into it, it’s not going to be that interesting. Whereas if you add things into the plan such as hidden doors, secret niches, and elements that add interest, such as curvature, it will make a room much more unique, and you’ll have a much more interesting backdrop to everyday life events.
3. Design with Juxtaposition
This is not only about juxtaposition in materials – using soft, plush velvets against hard burl woods – but also juxtaposition in time periods to create something more eclectic, using antiques mixed with bespoke pieces. There is also juxtaposition in how you think from the concept stage onwards. That could be a concept based on springtime, but with a darker, more moody interpretation of spring, rather than the usual pastels.
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