Rooms with a view: Bath-based creative Emilio Pimentel-Reid on designers’ houses

Bath-based creative Emilio Pimentel-Reid’s new book, All Things Considered, looks at how top designers craft deeply personal interiors for themselves. Showcasing 16 distinctive homes, it celebrates creativity, risk-taking and the joy of spaces that truly reflect their owners’ personalities. Here is a small taste and introduction to the book in Emilio’s own words…

As a UK-based design author and creative strategist, I come into contact with top designers across the world. The idea for this book came from my regular conversations with them, and from my desire to reveal how these international creatives are fashioning highly personal interiors for themselves, as well as to explore the relationship we all have with our homes. This book highlights distinctive spaces: some historically influenced and others at the cutting edge of contemporary design, some serene and several provocative, but all uplifting and created with great thought, confidence and flair. In the mix of moods, colours, patterns, objects and textures shown, all things have been very thoughtfully considered – leaving room for style, surprise, joy and personality.

To widen the scope of the visual conversation, there are a mix of designers represented from the UK and influential design capitals across the rest of Europe and in North America, all at the top of their game. Each designer shines for their original style of decoration and the bold mix of elements they incorporate into their interiors. The idea is not to capture one point of view or look, but rather about encountering accomplished spaces built on integrity, gut feeling, deep knowledge and great personality. Featured creatives are at different stages in their professional careers, from those who are just being discovered, through those who are established, to a few legendary names who are still leaders in the industry. They all have inspiring viewpoints to share.

As someone passionate about homes, still filled with curiosity after 25 years exploring and promoting design, I have found that often the most alluring and successful interiors are those that designers conceive for themselves. Perhaps this is because they experiment at home before deploying their ideas on clients, or because they take risks that they might not in professional projects. At home, also, they often tackle challenges that are not faced by their clients: budget or size of space, maybe, or the even tougher challenge of committing to design choices for oneself. Each designer has approached their interior differently – just as you should.

The 16 homes featured in the book (with just a fraction of examples shown here) constitute a celebration of individuality, an uplifting collection of interiors that mix varied elements with gusto to create joyful spaces. In real life we are all very different – at different stages of our lives, with different passions and taste – and designers are just like us, except with great expertise. They are all highly knowledgeable about the zeitgeist at any given moment, yet refreshingly admit to not caring about trends. This liberating outlook leads to interiors that have great longevity, because they are made just for their owners. These artists, gallerists, designers and other creatives with varied backgrounds value a strong sense of personality above all else.

I hope you will be inspired by these great mixologists. Not with drinks, of course, but blending personality and style to encourage you to celebrate your individuality and create interiors that are very You.

Below: New York decorator Sasha Bikoff’s home in West Village is bold and imaginative, inspired by the past, nature, art, architecture and film. “I create a new world based on a story that I make up,’ she explains. “I consider myself a storyteller. In the townhouse I imagined an eccentric woman living in her home, her husband allowing her to do whatever she chose. I wanted it to feel as though this was a house in London’s Notting Hill, a little Victorian with a bit of French country and other references from trips to the European continent.

Below: Philip Hooper, joint managing director of Britain’s longest-established interior-decorating firm, Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, lives on the border between Clapham and Brixton Hill in south London. In this converted Victorian school, the classrooms are now lofty apartments, with high ceilings and huge windows that give a faintly industrial feel. The developers sold the units as empty space – basically one big classroom – and in his, Philip has put everything where he wanted it. His home is well edited, bringing together pieces from different cultures and periods. “There is a selection of random objects that is given coherence as they are filtered through me,” he says. Beyond being his pied-à-terre, the apartment is a space to show paintings. It is really one big open-plan studio, so no single corner outshines another.

Below: Born in Israel, the designer Michal Silver lived a rather nomadic life between Tel Aviv, New York and Paris before settling in London 28 years ago. Currently creative director at Christopher Farr Cloth, Michal’s building is in a conservation area at the far western end of Chelsea. Originally part of a Congregational chapel built in 1855, the architecture creates a framework for the interiors, like a frame for an artwork, yet is also functional and structural, setting the tone for the way the house was decorated.

Below: The interior architect Gert Voorjans inhabits a 19th-century mansion in the centre of Antwerp, Belgium, a city known for its intermingling of history, cutting-edge creativity and commerce. “We are lucky,” Gert says, “still to have beautiful old houses with high ceilings and good proportions that bring poetry into an interior. My dream as a child was to live in a house with wooden floors, high ceilings and an open fire.”

Below: Willow Kemp’s flat is in the upper reaches of a converted building in London’s Chelsea. Willow – who is an art ambassador for her family’s Firmdale Hotels and design director at Kit Kemp Design Studio – has claimed an extra 0.6 m (2 ft) in ceiling height by opening up the loft space. Decorated with the flair of an artist and the know-how of a top designer, the flat combines her passion for collecting contemporary art and fascinating objects with a technical understanding of architecture.

Below: American-born J.J. Martin is founder and creative director of fashion and homeware label La DoubleJ, known for its unapologetic maximalism plied with joy. J.J.’s building housing her Milan apartment dates from 1910, but follows the Gothic Revival style of the 19th century. J.J. says, “I need to have a wonderful, beautiful container that feels very well structured and organised and visually pleasing. That’s how I get my sense of safety. And then I can create from that place. In the end I need an interior that feels inviting, juicy, joyful.”

Below: The Bath design shop Berdoulat shares its name with an 18th-century farmhouse in south-western France, the childhood home of its founder, the interior designer Patrick Williams. Patrick’s home occupies the floors above and rooms behind the shop in a charming and generously proportioned Grade II listed building in a quiet neighbourhood near the centre of the city.
The building is 1760s at the front, 1840s in the middle and 1800 at the rear, with sympathetic additions by Patrick and his Bulgarian-born wife Neri.