Detached Studio is the practice of Rob House — artist, illustrator, and maker.
Flat planes, cut and placed in space. Picture books, art objects, and spatial installations that reward the viewer who moves. Work rooted in what it feels like to be small in a world built for a different scale.
Fifteen years of commercial illustration experience across health, publishing, advertising and public sector work — now directing that foundation toward narrative placemaking, public art, and self-authored publishing.
Work that reveals more the closer you look.
Detached Studio is a one-person practice based in Surrey, UK, working across picture books, handmade art objects, and spatial installations.
The work starts from a single making logic: the flat cutout. A flat plane, cut to a silhouette and placed in space, reads differently depending on where you stand. That principle scales from a printed page to a park — and everything the studio makes is built from it.
The practice is rooted in a particular emotional territory: what it feels like to be small in a world built for a different scale. That question runs through the picture books, the objects, and the large-scale figures that form the installation work.
Rob House has fifteen years of professional illustration experience across health, publishing, advertising and public sector work. Detached Studio is where that foundation is being directed toward narrative placemaking, public art, and self-authored publishing.
About
Rob House has spent fifteen years working as a professional illustrator for some of the world's most recognisable brands — including Google, HBO, ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola, HSBC, Arup and TfL. That experience across editorial, health, publishing and corporate work built the professional foundation the studio stands on today.
In recent years a distinct visual language has emerged — geometric, reductive, warm. Flat planes, considered colour, figures stripped to their emotional essence. That style now defines everything Detached Studio makes, and is increasingly being directed toward narrative placemaking — spatial installations and environmental graphic design for therapeutic and public environments.
The two strands aren't separate practices. They're the same eye, applied to different scales.