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I never want to live in or create a museum, and that was a risk here when deciding what to display in my house in Worcestershire (which was once the girls’ wing of a school before it was converted in the 1990s). Museums are great, but you can’t relax in them. I’m a bit of a compulsive collector, though, and I fall in love really quickly and easily with beauty. As an interior designer, I’m always sourcing things for work. Sometimes something finds me and I just have to have it.
I was inspired by Sir John Soane’s house near Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. John Soane was a prominent British architect who collected all the classics: Roman and Greek artefacts, Egyptian as well. It’s all there in his house—which was, ironically, turned into a museum—and there’s so much stuff, but everything has its place.
Almost everything in my own house is a piece that I collected even before I had a place for it. It’s a bit cart-before-the-horse, but that's how I operate. I'm committed to the things I acquire, and I know that I’ll eventually find somewhere to put them. But I still wanted this space to feel curated and not cluttered.
I love the tension and the drama between old and new, rough and smooth, tall and short, light and dark. It all creates a rhythm so that you feel like you’re on a journey rather than just looking at something. The sofa in the living room, for example, is from the 1970s. It was designed by Warren Platner for a company called Steel Case and I found it in North Carolina. It’s travelled all over the world, and now it’s here, in this little town called Bewdley.
The red Vernon Panton chair is from the 1960s, and the color creates a dialogue with the two red 1969 Prince of Wales Investiture chairs across the way, designed by Lord Snowden, uncle of the now king. I love royal themes, and upstairs I have portraits that I got at auction of kings and queens, I don’t even know who some of them are.
That mysterious element, the intrigue of the unknown, really appeals to me. Some of these paintings are hundreds of years old, and when I think about the people who painted them, I wonder where they lived, where they traveled. I don’t know the answers, but it kickstarts your imagination. That’s the power of art.
I bought the painting behind my couch in the living room from an independent seller in Sweden. When it arrived it was much larger than I anticipated, but it ended up being perfect on the wall. Was it part of a bigger painting? I think at some stage someone must have reframed it, maybe reducing it in scale. I’ll never know, but I’ll keep thinking about it.
I’ve injected this passion for mystery into my work too, especially when I design hotels, which I see as living, breathing things. I love looking for vintage pieces and antiques for these spaces because it adds so much layering to an interior. For the re-design project I did of the Pulitzer Amsterdam, which is 25 interconnected canal houses, I thought a lot about what might have once been in those 400-year-old buildings.
With any project I do, the most important thing is storytelling, which is like a swear word now because it’s so overused, but it’s always been a part of my approach. Everything has to have a meaning or a purpose, even if you make it up yourself. If you can talk about a piece of art, even if it’s only the story of how you found it or the fact that you don't know anything about it, there’s some intrigue there. That takes it from being an object to being something emotional.
There are so many stories in each one of my paintings. There’s one depicting Samson and Delilah from the Bible when he’s getting his hair cut in his sleep. It’s quite provocative and a little bit cheeky because she’s really putting her chest on display while doing this cruel act. Next to it are two paintings, one is a man, the other a woman, and I absolutely love them both looking upwards. It’s the opposite of how my statues look down.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere in South Africa, and I didn’t really have access to art. What I learned came through books. As a result, I always responded to the physicality of statues and busts. I’m fascinated by the skill it takes to, essentially, turn stone into a human. And there’s also the anticipation, the anxiety, of having had one chance to carve this thing—you can’t make a mistake.
I have a massive bust of Diana the Huntress. She’s made of fiberglass, but it took the help of three friends to position her on this ledge over the staircase. I also have a statue of Antinous, the lover of the emperor Hadrian. I got it from a furniture company, which used it as a prop. Antinous was said to be the most beautiful man in the Roman empire until he drowned tragically and mysteriously in the Nile. In the living room is a sculpture from an old French church that I got from Lovejoys Antiques on Instagram. I think it’s a scene from the crucifixion of Jesus. I don’t know what building it would have been from, and I imagine, maybe, that it got damaged in the war. But it’s in a happy place now.
In my work and at home, I find that there’s real beauty in things not being perfect. That’s the nice thing about collecting old paintings. There’s one that I think might have been in a fire because I can see water marks dripping down the side of it. Some of the frames are a bit rough around the edges, chipped or with little bits missing, and I love that because it disarms you. Imperfection is the most human thing.
This feature has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
