Dame Zaha Hadid launches luxury homeware range with Harrods

Line includes £9,999 serving platter with signature curves

Iraqi-British architect Dame Zaha Hadid has designed a homeware collection for Harrods (Getty Images )

If the sinuous curves of the bone china teacups don’t betray their creator then the gently undulating Aqua Platter surely will.

Dame Zaha Hadid has launched her first “luxury homeware line” and the exclusive Harrods range, which includes a £9,999 serving platter, boasts the signature aesthetic of the acclaimed architect.

The Iraqi-British Hadid, 63, famed for her spectacular curved buildings, including the London 2012 Aquatics Centre, has previously lent her design skills to futuristic swimwear, wine bottles, footwear and a superyacht.

Now the award-winning architect is partnering with Harrods’ interior department to sell her debut lifestyle collection for the home, albeit a well resourced one.

The range offers Hadid admirers the opportunity to take home miniature versions of her buildings – for a price. The hand-finished Aqua Platter (£9,999) “conveys the fluid rhythms of water in motion” and clearly references Hadid’s London Aquatics Centre. In a certain light, the teardrop-shaped platter might also resemble a sinister alien craft.

Hadid's vases for Harrods

A bargain at £43 are anthracite cups and saucers “inspired by the intersection of nature and the built environment, with individual Lotus-like structures combining to create an abstract vision of a city-scape. The vessels offer multipurpose functionality with smooth satin exteriors and glossy interiors.”

A range of scented candles housed within vessels are based on studies for the architect’s skyscraper tower designs.

Perfect for the Bond villain in your life, the curvaceous £4,860 Field of Towers Chess Set “represents the intense research and evolutionary processes within Hadid’s architecture”.

Hadid's candle holders

The individual towers “articulate the various points of adaptation and possible iterations explored for each project. Each piece takes on its own persona – the elegant, shapely queen; the king with his crown-like peaks and stature. Collectively, they form a map of the many stages of development and research Hadid undertakes for each of her architectural projects.”

Christian Gibbon, general manager of Zaha Hadid Architects, said the lifestyle collection offered “affordable pieces that can be bought on the high street, but which are also aspirational”.

Woody Yao, director of Zaha Hadid Design, said the homeware pieces “subtly reference Zaha’s architecture”. The coloured swooshes of the Aqua Platter “follow similar forms to the roof on the Olympic Aquatic centre, but seen from an angled perspective rather than simply copying the shape”.

Zaha Hadid's £9,999 serving platter

Not everyone was impressed by the chance to add a little Hadid to their home. Owen Pomery, a member of the Society of Architectural Illustration, tweeted: “Zaha’s tragic homeware range is about as far from all that is important about architecture as you can get.”

One commenter on the Dezeen architecture and design website wrote: “All plain ugly and kitsch”. Another suggested Hadid would be better to "stick to buildings”.

Ms Hadid, the two-time Stirling Prize for architecture winner last week won the commission for a new £5m gallery dedicated to maths at the Science Museum in London, with a design that explores “the many influences of mathematics in our everyday lives”.

Hadid's £4,860 chess set

In July she became the first woman to the Design Museum Design of the Year Award for the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan, which features Hadid's signature elaborate curves and undulations.

The Harrods range, launched during the London Design Festival, will also be sold through Hadid’s design website.