Can Tan France make your living room the best dressed in the house?

Singapore-founded furniture brand Castlery has unveiled its first-ever designer collaboration, partnering with fashion designer and television personality Tan France on an 18-piece home collection.

The collaboration also marks France's first venture into furniture design, extending his work beyond fashion into home interiors. The collection spans living, dining, lighting, rugs, décor and accessories, blending France's design sensibilities with Castlery's focus on craftsmanship and accessible contemporary furniture.

Speaking to MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, Declan Ee, co-founder and president of Castlery, said the brand was deliberate about finding a partner with a genuine point of view for its first designer collaboration, rather than simply attaching a famous name to a collection.

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While Castlery considered several potential partners, Ee said France stood out because of the parallels between his multicultural background and the brand's Singapore roots. France grew up in a British-Pakistani household in Yorkshire before building a career across multiple creative disciplines and eventually making a home with his family in the United States.

As a brand founded in Singapore, a market shaped by the intersection of different cultures, Ee said France's experience of moving between cultures and creating his own sense of home resonated with Castlery.

"This was never a celebrity endorsement," said Ee. He added that France brought firm views on how people should live with the pieces, how they should feel and the stories they should tell, with his personal experiences ultimately forming much of the collection's creative brief.

Strategically, Ee said the partnership is intended to help consumers understand not only what Castlery sells, but what it stands for as a design brand as the company grows internationally.

A collaboration of this scale allows Castlery to reach new audiences through a strong creative story while demonstrating that a Singapore-founded brand can develop design with relevance across different international markets, he explained.

According to Castlery, the collection draws on France's multicultural background, incorporating influences from South Asian architecture, family rituals and everyday experiences into contemporary furniture and home accessories.

The collaboration was developed over 15 months, with France working closely alongside Castlery's in-house design team at its Singapore headquarters. The process included multiple product development sessions, where ideas and personal references were translated into furniture pieces spanning sofas, dining tables, accent chairs, lighting and decorative accessories.

Among the collection's highlights are the modular 'Kagan sofa', the 'Anaya tea table' inspired by intimate family tea gatherings, the 'Avan dining collection' designed around shared meals, and the handblown glass 'Anika table lamp', which draws inspiration from South Asian architectural forms and colour palettes.

The collection launched globally on 6 August across Castlery's five markets — the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Singapore — supported by its showroom network in New York, Sydney, Brisbane and Singapore.

To mark the launch, Castlery and France hosted an event at Nine Orchard's Greenhouse in New York City on 5 August, bringing together media, the design community and friends of France, including Antoni Porowski, Jonathan Van Ness, Jeremiah Brent and Nate Berkus.

The venue was transformed using pieces from the collection, with living and dining settings designed to mirror the experience of hosting at home. Guests gathered around pieces including the 'Avan dining table', 'Kagan sofa' and 'Anaya coffee table', while the 'Anika table lamp' featured throughout the space.

The evening also reflected the cross-cultural inspiration behind the collaboration through food and styling. Canapés inspired by Singaporean and South Asian cuisine, including IRVINS salted egg yolk chips topped with egg and caviar, were served alongside Singapore Sling cocktails.

Pastry chef Dominique Ansel was also tapped to create desserts inspired by a salted egg pastry France discovered during his time in Singapore.

For Ee, bringing those Singapore elements into the New York event was deliberate. He described seeing a company started in Singapore introduce its first designer collaboration on an international stage in New York as a particularly meaningful moment.

Three days later, Castlery extended the launch to consumers at its Chelsea flagship, where France introduced the collection in person and took part in an intimate Q&A. Complimentary chai, another of France's favourites, was also served.

The events form only one part of Castlery's marketing push for the collection. Across its markets, the launch is being supported through earned media, social storytelling and creator-led content, alongside locally tailored showroom experiences aimed at helping consumers discover the cultural references, materials and design thinking behind individual pieces.

Rather than concentrating the campaign around a single launch moment, Ee said Castlery wants the story to continue through the homes the pieces enter, the ways consumers style them and wider conversations around identity, personal style and what makes a home feel like one's own.

The partnership also forms part of Castlery's ambition to be recognised as a global design brand founded in Singapore, a distinction Ee said is important to the company.

"We want credit not only for making well-designed furniture more accessible, but for having a clear point of view on contemporary design — an elevated, aspirational aesthetic that is still tailored to how our customers actually live. Aspiration without relevance is just decoration," he said.

According to Ee, the right creative partnership can accelerate that ambition in two ways: by strengthening Castlery's design credentials and introducing the brand to audiences that may not previously have encountered it.

"The right creative partnership accelerates that on two fronts. It sharpens our design credentials, and it opens us up to audiences who may never have encountered Castlery — we inherit some of the trust our partner has already built with the people who follow them," he said.

Ee also confirmed that more designer collaborations are on the horizon, with Castlery actively building a pipeline and speaking with potential partners. However, the company is not looking to turn collaborations into a high-frequency marketing formula.

"This is not a programme of five or six collaborations a year — a collection like this takes real effort from both sides, and doing it properly is the only version worth doing," said Ee.

Future collaborations will instead depend on Castlery finding partners with a distinctive point of view and an idea that can genuinely add something to the brand, he added.

For the France collaboration, success will also be measured beyond product sales. While Ee confirmed that Castlery has a revenue target for the collection, he said the partnership is as much a brand-building exercise as a commercial one.

"There is a revenue target, as there would be for any collection, and we track it. But we go into these partnerships knowing they are as much a brand-building exercise as a commercial one, and we would be measuring the wrong thing if we judged it on sell-through alone," said Ee.

On the brand front, the objective is "elevation and talkability", with Castlery looking to enter conversations and communities where it has previously had less of a presence, including design and culture media, key opinion leaders and different lifestyle communities.

The company will track share of voice across design, interiors, lifestyle and culture, alongside sentiment and engagement.

Castlery is also monitoring incremental awareness generated by France, including traffic from consumers encountering the brand for the first time because of the collaboration rather than because they were already shopping for furniture.

Some of those consumers may become customers immediately, while others could return when they are next furnishing a home, with Ee pointing to that longer-term consideration as another component of the partnership's return.

There is also a less quantifiable benchmark for Ee. As both Castlery's first designer collaboration and France's first furniture collection, he said success would mean consumers can see both parties reflected in the finished products rather than viewing the range as simply one name attached to another.

"The best collaborations create something neither party would have made alone. That's ultimately what we wanted this collection to do," said Ee.

The collaboration comes as Castlery continues to build its global brand presence. Earlier this year, the Singapore-headquartered furniture company appointed bSIDE as its strategic communications agency to support its corporate communications and reputation management as it accelerates its international expansion.

The one-year mandate sees bSIDE develop Castlery's core corporate messaging from Singapore while aligning communications across its key markets. Founded in 2013, Castlery has since expanded from a local startup into an international furniture brand operating across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, supported by an integrated business model spanning design, production, supply chain and omnichannel retail.

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