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We look at how artists have been involved in the interiors business in the past and ask why this continues to be such a fruitful relationship, with some surprising contemporary examples.

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From the beginning of the industrial revolution, manufacturers have been keen to use the talents of artists to develop, decorate and distinguish their products. But where once a potter, carver, or carpenter made the aesthetic decisions about the wares they produced, in mass production the roles of designer and manufacturer were separated. Although today there is a 'back to basics' nostalgia for craft and the hand-made, industry continues to look to what we now called 'artists' (itself a 19th-century construct in the current meaning of the term) to add aesthetic appeal - and of course commercial value - to their products.

Christopher Farr at Somerset House

Perhaps some of the first examples happened in textiles. Patterned fabrics needed 060 artists in industry designers, and the rug in particular would become an icon of modernism. The elegant designs of Anni Albers and others are still very much in demand and artists' rugs continue to be popular. A recent exhibition at London's Somerset House saw Christopher Farr exhibit reissues of Albers' designs alongside new works from British artist Gary Hume. And artists' fabrics enjoyed enormous popularity in the 20th century. For proof just take a look at the roster of artists in the London Fashion and Textile Museum's exhibition of artists' textiles this spring, which read like a who's who of modernism: Chagall, Dalí, Hepworth, Picasso and Warhol.

Anni Albers' DRXVII

In the UK, Lucienne Day, John Piper and Graham Sutherland are well-known for their designs for Heals and others from the Fifties onwards, and many of these fabric designs have returned to production, in line with the abiding fashion for the retro look. Less well-known is that fact that artist Francis Bacon had an early career as an interior decorator, designing desks, rugs and whole interiors. One of the more avant-garde spaces he designed, which was reproduced in the magazine The Studio magazine in 1930, even included rubber curtains. In the Sixties and Seventies there was a further fascination for breaking down barriers and makers working across disciplines - for example in Europe we find architecture graduates like Verner Panton and Gio Ponti moving across architecture, furniture, textile and product design.

Red Meander

Hotels and corporate interiors have long looked to add cultural credence to their spaces with art. But the Hyatt Regency hotel The Churchill in Portman Square, London has recently taken things one step further to create what it calls 'a cultural playground throughout the hotel' in collaboration with the Saatchi Gallery. Not as you might expect just a curated selection of works in the hotel's public areas - Hyatt and Saatchi have created a 'Saatchi Suite' in which are installed unique, site-specific installations, alongside Fritz Hansen furniture.

The Saatchi Suite in the Hyatt Regency hotel The Churchill in Portman Square, London

Artist Celine Fitoussi takes the suite's luxury bathroom to a new level: her bespoke wall-to- wall soap installation transforms the space into an arena of sensory and visual delight. But it also asks guests to ponder the hotel experience on a more conceptual level and think of issues such as use, reuse and sustainability, as well as how the body we inhabit and attend to through cleansing rituals relates to our cerebral selves.

Gallery Fumi in London's Hoxton specialises in furniture which blurs the boundaries between design and fine art. Tuomas Markunpoika's Engineering Temporality Cabinet (2012) has been a surprisingly commercial success for the gallery. It is manufactured by covering a wooden armoire in washers welded together and then burning the structure away to reveal the ghostly exoskeleton. Gallery director Valerio Capo explains the work's popularity as simply 'one of the most poetic and inspiring works we have come across to date'.

Blurring boundaries between design and fine art is Tuomas Markunpoika's Engineering Temporality Cabinet (2012)

Maarten Baas, like Markunpoika a former student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, has also famously used the effects of fire in his Smoke series. Partially burning and then sealing ornate Chippendale-style furniture to give a gothic and somewhat unsettling effect, the designer's work recalls conceptual art's fascination with process and erasure. He went on to 'burn' classics of 20th-century furniture design by the likes of Eames, Gaudí, Rietveld and Sottsass. In an ironic twist in the tale, Baas's Smoke series now re-enters the canon of art and design history through its inclusion in the permanent collections of the Groninger Museum, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Blockprinted wood-grain motifs on a utilitarian cabinet create WrongWood

Central Saint Martins and Royal College of Art-trained Ptolemy Mann is another artist who has been lured into the interiors industry. The starting point was her hand-dyed and woven artworks that she still makes on her own loom. She says: 'I have been making them since my days at the Royal College and for about 12 years they were the only things I did. For a long time I refused to even think about commercial application; I just wasn't interested and I thought I would never be able to do the work justice.' But Christopher Farr initially tempted her into industry, first on a collection of modernist-design inspired rugs: 'They also asked me to design a digitally printed furnishing fabric and I started to look at digital printing. This is where things started changing...I realised that digital print allowed me to scan the hand-dyed and woven artworks and print them directly on to cloth with amazing colour reproduction.'

Antony Gormley's Room (2014), at the new Beaumont Hotel, Mayfair

Mann's ongoing collaboration with Rugmaker has led to a stunning and continually expanding collection of flatweaves and she has also recently produced a new range of bedlinen for Linen House. When not designing textiles, she also works as a colour consultant in architecture. Completed projects include a reception mural scheme for Mile End Hospital, London and a series of external and internal colour panels for Kings Mill Hospital, Nottinghamshire. For Clerkenwell Design Week this year, Mann worked with Johnsons Tiles to design a 18m x 3m wall of coloured tiles to showcase the company's collection. Is her work art, craft or design? 'All three.... in equal measure I believe,' she says. 'It often depends on who you are speaking to. All of these boundaries are changing and opening up; it's very exciting.'

Witty crockery by David Shrigley for Sketch, London

British artist Richard Woods is renowned for his work with garish and repeat motifs that he has applied to floors and walls in his gallery installations. He teamed up with designer Sebastian Wrong to create 'WrongWoods' for Established & Sons. Woods' block-printed woodgrain motifs were applied to Wrong's utilitarian cabinets. These are reminiscent of Fifties' furniture - a fitting vehicle as much of Woods' work is based on a nostalgia for mid-century domestic interiors. The result is a family of cabinets and chests of drawers, a long low credenza and a wall unit, available in four of Woods' signature colourways.

Woods says: 'The utilitarian feel of the furniture we have made is somewhat at odds with the cartoon graphic surface that covers it, and I feel this marriage illustrates perfectly the success of the collaborative process. This is a new body of work that is both playful as well as being respectful to its aesthetic origins.'

Jean Cocteau textile designs have been reissued to mark the 50th anniversary of his death

Artists are getting in on the act with architecture too: British artist Antony Gormley recently collaborated with the Grosvenor property group to create an extraordinary addition to the Beaumont Hotel, which opens in Mayfair's Brown Hart Gardens this autumn. The inhabitable sculpture, entitled Room, consists of a vast anamorphic growth rests atop a low-level wing to the south of the hotel's imposing yet elegant art deco-inspired facade.

Discussing the collaboration in terms of what philosophy has called the 'mind/body problem', Gormley said: 'I take the body as our primary habitat. Room contrasts a visible exterior of a body formed from large rectangular masses with an inner experience... My ambition for this work is that it should confront the monumental with the most personal, intimate experience.'

Artist Sarah Lucas has created furniture in unfinished wood and breeze blocks

Sarah Lucas might seem like an unlikely artist to make furniture. But it is perhaps the 'feminine' associations of furniture that have prompted her to make a decidedly 'unfeminine' series of works that use unfinished wood and breezeblock and pun on the forms of furniture. Lucas channels a thread in contemporary feminist artistic practice that runs back to Judy Chicago's iconic work The Dinner Party (1974-79). Chicago used furniture - in this case a triangular table with 39 place settings. Each setting consists of embroidered mats, chalices and utensils, and ceramic plates with raised elements resembling female genitalia and butterflies, commemorating important women from history.

On the subject of crockery and unlikely collaborations, who would have thought that art-world outsider and provocateur David Shrigley would be designing plates? But that's what Shrigley has done for chef Pierre Gagnaire's restaurant Sketch in London. Speaking with characteristic wit and in his usual laconic style, he says of his new ceramics: 'It will be the first artwork that I have made that can go in the dishwasher. It will be very clean artwork. Clean artwork is good artwork, in my opinion.'

The witty crockery is an extension of a more radical intervention in the Sketch Gallery and dining spaces of the restaurant, including 239 new works launched this June. It is the latest in a series of collaborations that Sketch has instigated with artists including Martin Creed, John Baldessari and Michael Nyman.

What is interesting about the artists Sketch has worked with since 2002 is that they sit at the more conceptual and potentially more difficult end of the artistic spectrum. Shrigley however, looks set to become a household name (in London at least) in 2016 when his sculpture Really Good (a 10m-tall clenched fist cast in bronze giving a 'thumbs up', with a comically enlarged thumb) will rest on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Artist Jean Cocteau, considering he was famous in his lifetime for his flamboyantly decorated ceramics, is a less surprising choice for a range of crockery. The new Cocteau range from Roche Bobois, launched in 2013 to coincide with the 5oth anniversary of Cocteau's death, includes ceramics, rugs, embroidered cushions and other fabrics , and was developed in collaboration with the Jean Cocteau Committee and its president Pierre Bergé.

With his ceramics originally manufactured between 1957 and 1963 in Villfranche-sur-Mer on the Cote d'Azur, Cocteau saw them as artworks in their own right rather than a form of applied art. The reissued ceramics have been recreated with fastidious attention to detail and using many of the artist's original techniques, and are available in limited, numbered editions.

The New Craft
The current appetite for reissued pieces by artist-makers such as Cocteau is in line with what appears to be a real shift towards the handmade in interiors. The New Craftsman's new permanent home in London's North Row is already becoming the contemporary design destination for those looking for the craft aesthetic in contemporary interiors. And Another Country, which has recently opened a new store in Lonon's burgeoning design district of Marylebone, treads a similar path with the focus firmly on designer-makers who champion the handmade.

While 'Barn the Spoon' has become an unlikely media personality, he was recently found hand-carving wooden spoons at Clerkenwell Design Week. His popularity is such that his workshops are frequently fully booked months in advance and there is often a long waiting list for his homely yet covetable one-off spoons.

British design house St Jude's - along with newer exponents such as Rapture and Wright - also celebrates the handmade. Founded in 2005 by Simon and Angie Lewin, St Jude's has become synonymous with a 'back to basics' approach to creating unique fabrics and wallpapers with a nostalgic feel.

As well as translating artist Angie Lewin's own works into designs for interiors, the couple work with artists, makers and printers including Mark Hearld, Ed Kluz and Emily Sutton.'We take an interest in fine art and commercial design, but we are particularly inspired by work produced in the middle ground between the two,' says the Lewins. 'We love Edward Bawden's graphic design and illustration work for London Transport, for example, and Eric Ravilious's ceramics for Wedgwood. It appears that some wonderful and unexpected things can happen when a talented individual meets a visually aware organisation. This is very much the spirit we try to foster at St Jude's.'

Perhaps 19 Greek Street gives us a hint of things to come. Established in 2012 by Marc Péridis, the gallery/cafe/design library/ laboratory/interior design practice in London's Soho is truly blurring boundaries not just between art and industry, but between art and life. It is finding new ways of making and being, championing a participatory approach with a focus on sustainable and socially responsible design.

Royal College of Art graduate Diana Simpson Hernandez recently established a 'Glass Lab' on the premises' top floor. The lab makes tiles and surfaces by 'upcycling' used glass bottles that are crushed and combined with a polycarbonate resin. The resulting hexagonal tiles and bespoke slabs have been used to stunning effect on the bar and in the lavatories of new private members' club The Library in St Martin's Lane, London.

Stressing the way in which the project brings people together (Simpson Hernandez uses waste collected from local businesses or street-found items), she explains: 'I am interested in looking at waste as a resource to produce alternative economies at local level to empower small businesses and nurture communities.' She hopes the project will 'create new social interactions and business opportunities that reinforce the local culture, values and traditions'.