It’s perhaps fair to say there is an obsession with quality design and a tunnel-vision commitment behind everything Ferrious does.

A visit to its 6,000 sq ft retail showroom on Whitworth Street will corroborate this as the eye is immediately drawn to the distinctive 60s and 70s inspired furniture dotted around the Cathedral-like space and, it has to be said, a life-size horse lamp in the corner.

Quirky? Maybe, but Ferrious – namely Jeremy West and Paul Tempest – are far from quixotic in their designs.

Innovation and principles married with distinction and imagination make the duo the ‘go to’ designers when it comes to the big shots wanting their homes, cruise ships and government offices redesigned.

And it’s these attributes which saw Manchester Metropolitan University come calling with a quarter million pound budget when it wanted the atrium in the four-story Faculty of Humanities re-energised.

The project has recently been recognised as Best Interior for Public Space at the Northern Design Awards.

The duo had previously worked on furniture for the public spaces for the new Manchester School of Art, which opened in 2013 (it was shortlisted for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling Prize, 2014) – something of a labour of love as both West and Tempest are graduates of the art school.

The Faculty of Humanities has more than 5,000 students using its facilities and Ferrious were brought in to look at the existing atrium and public spaces to create a more inspiring and welcoming environment.

West says: “We had an immediate vision of developing a space where students would want to come together to socialise and learn.”

The internal courtyard is in the university’s Geoffrey Manton building and, according to West, was a huge space that students tended to ‘avoid’.

“It was very much a wasted area,” he says, “and had a clinical and extremely unwelcoming feel about it.”

An impressive 12 weeks was all it took to completely transform the place with 600-year-old gnarly olive trees in illuminated pots, Romeo and Juliet benches, Philllippe Starck Bibliotheque Nationale lights and different colour schemes on each floor. And all within the £250,000 budget.

Tempest says: “It can be a leap of faith when an academic environment chooses to look at the design elements of their buildings.

“The public areas are often quite soulless and don’t really encourage creativity and thinking, whilst the focus stays on the study rooms.

“On visits to the building, we are delighted to see students and academic staff using the spaces to interact and give the building the buzz it deserves.”

Since working on the Geoffrey Manton Building project, Ferrious has been invited to work on the Draper’s Courtyard space at the university’s Righton Building and the halls of residence at Birley Fields.

A team in demand around the world

Meeting at Manchester School of Art (Manchester Polytechnic) in the 1980s, Paul Tempest and Jeremy West realised they both had the same vision for design.

Tempest was studying fine art and West interior design and in 1989 they started to do bits of work for the Vinyl Exchange before establishing Ferrious in 1996.

In that same year, Ferrious held exhibitions of their work in London, Paris and Milan and, over the past decade, the team has exhibited collections worldwide and designed furniture and interiors for the Home Office, Urban Splash, Zouk Restaurant, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester City Football Academy, Chelsea Football Club, a Palm Springs mansion and a Sheikh’s villa in Jeddah.

The duo were also influential in the renovation project of the iconic art deco Midland Hotel in Morecambe, sourcing furnishings for bedrooms and public areas.

Spring of 2005 saw West and Tempest open the first Ferrous showroom in a railway arch on Manchester’s Whitworth Street after people started asking where they could get their furniture designs from.

West adds: “We had to react to the demand and so decided to transform and extend our workshop space into a showroom.”

Ferrious now has an online presence selling modern furniture, lightings, storage and kitchens.

Today, Ferrious design skills are multi-disciplinary and can tackle anything form specialist lighting projects to office ergonomics, a full interior building and design concept to sourcing bespoke furniture.

International they might be, but they do still like to work closer to home and recent projects have included redesigning the Cheshire home of the director of a hugely popular TV period drama and the house of an award winning writer of an acclaimed TV series set in Manchester.