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WOW!house 2024 + Design Centre Chelsea Harbour London

Artisan Residence

When asked what her favourite season is, Moira Rose, star of Netflix series Schitt’s Creek, responds, “Awards Season!” No doubt if Moira was living in the English capital she would say “The Season!”. London society events really take off in June and WOW!house has been cleverly placed right at the beginning of the month just before everyone is dusting down their top hats for Royal Ascot. Claire German, CEO of Chelsea Harbour Design Centre, says,

“In just three years, WOW!house has brought our worldwide design family together, sparking conversations, building relationships, sharing knowledge, championing creativity and raising awareness for the charitable causes at its heart.” She calls it “an immersive interiors journey like no other; a journey that stands as a remarkable testament to creativity and design excellence”. We soon learn that, if anything, those words form an understatement.

A new cohort of 20 designers, from rising to global stars, has dreamt up 19 indoor and outdoor spaces totalling 500 square metres, each with their own scent (by Diptyque). Red carpets are so out of season. WOW!house has rolled out a polychromatic floral carpet designed by Jennifer Manners. The rooms flow one after the other like luxurious stationary railway carriages. Zoffany sponsored the Entrance Hall by British design and interiors creative Benedict Foley. He took inspiration from the country house Temple Newsam in Leeds, a damask draped scene in Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film The Leopard, and Zoffany’s heritage. “I’d like everyone to feel welcome,” declares Benedict, “and to imagine they are whirling round a palazzo ballroom in Italy.” It’s got the wow factor!

Richness becomes reality in the Legend Room, a sitting room and study. Alidad (being known monoymously is a sign of success in itself) joining forces with room sponsor Watts 1874 proves he really is one of the great high priests of interior design. The ecclesiastical ambience of this room is not accidental: many of the fabric house Watts 1874’s original commissions were for churches. After setting up his interior design studio in 1985, his work caught the eye of Min Hogg, Founding Editor of The World of Interiors magazine, and his reputation skyrocketed. “As a designer, I’m not interested in what’s here today and gone tomorrow,” Alidad confirms. “Look at the longevity of Watts. Having gone through the beige and cornice-free white cube phase, these fabrics have survived and are as relevant today as they were 150 years ago.” Minimalists beware!

American designer Ken Fulk worked with The Rug Company to bring us the atmospheric Dining Room. He believes, “Rugs are an incredible medium telling stories of our humanity via exquisite craftmanship for thousands of years.” A bespoke rug for the Dining Room is based on the storytelling of blue and white Delft tilework. This is another interior where the fifth wall, the ceiling, is given special attention. Ornamental mouldings and coffers printed with drawings provide a bold backdrop for the chandelier of recycled plastic bottles by artist Thierry Jeannot. Place settings by ceramicist Linda Fahey are a riot of pattern and colour. Minimalists still beware!

“It’s actually really hard to design when you’ve no client,” smiles Lucy Hammond Giles of Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler. She’s created the bright and cheery Morning Room. “It’s a room where you’d want to sit on a Saturday with a coffee and a newspaper – the perfect refuge,” she reckons. We do concur. A balustraded and pedimented birdcage is a quintessential country house interior piece. It’s like a maquette of the conservatory of Ballyfin in County Laois (which of course is fitted with Grants Blinds from the Design Centre). Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler is the longest established decorating firm in the UK. Lucy marks its 90th anniversary with butter coloured curtains paying homage to the company’s famous Yellow Room in Mayfair. Lucy has proved she is a great designer – and client!

Wimbledon is of course a fixture of The Season so it’s no surprise the Courtyard is a tennis pavilion. London based designer Katharine Pooley has completed projects in 24 countries but it is innate Britishness that she brings to this space. Sponsor McKinnon and Harris make America’s best aluminium outdoor furniture. It’s the perfect place to enjoy truffled scrambled egg and wild salmon canapés by Social Pantry, the hospitality leader in prison leaver employment. Design Restaurant by Social Pantry is its permanent base in the North Dome. Katharine confirms, “Sharing a devotion to traditional craftsmanship and timeless design, my partnership with McKinnon and Harris is more than mere synergy.” Anyone on the umpire’s seat would agree with that. The Courtyard is ace!

Nigerian British creator Tolù Adẹ̀kọ́’s Bedroom Suite really is a luxurious stationary railway carriage good enough to join the Orient Express. “This room design is a homage to the art of travel and textiles in the early 20th century,” he explains. Tolù was drawn to the pioneering spirit of the interior textile sponsor Zimmer and Rohde’s founders who originated during the days of Art Nouveau and Art Deco. The ribbed cornice and coved compartmented ceiling resemble an expanded suitcase. It’s a sultry and sexy room. Tolù Adẹ̀kọ́ is on the right track!

Charlotte Freemantle and her husband Will Fisher of Jamb London have sailed downstream from Pimlico to create the Primary Bedroom. A fourposter bed dominates the room as befits one of the city’s leading stockists of antiques and makers of exceptional reproduction chimneypieces, lighting and furniture. “The posts are washed in celadon blue to give that sleepy country house feel,” Will tells us. Inspired by the palettes and extravagant drapery of Renaissance and Baroque masters Rembrandt, Domenico Veneziano and Diego Velázquez, they have wrapped the walls in silk rendered in shades of dusky pink. A new pumice black and dove grey Grigio Carnico marble chimneypiece channels period pieces. Very sweet dreams!

Materiality again plays a central role in the Courtyard bedroom sponsored by American design house Schumacher and designed by British company Veere Grenney Associates. The fourposter is more contemporary in this bedroom: Schumacher damask drapes and checked upholstery linings with matching wall covering provide a restrained tailored feel. A Georgian chimneypiece from Jamb London and contemporary furniture from Veere Grenney’s own collection deliver an eclectic look. The designer admits, “I like to think that we design rooms you want to spend time in.” We don’t want to leave!

In yet another significant anniversary, Hill House Interiors have launched a capsule collection to celebrate their 25th anniversary. Hill House Lifestyle offers furniture, indoor and outdoor cushions, rugs and trimmings. The pieces are calm, sophisticated and all about the detailing. We join owners Helen Bygraves and Jenny Weiss for lunch in their first floor showroom in the South Dome of the Design Centre. Catering is once again by Social Pantry: we go for harissa baked salmon, bulgar wheat and spring onions. Helen says, “We hope you enjoy our Lifestyle Collection as much as we do.” We do!

The 20th century Anglo Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen once said of her ancestral residence Bowen’s Court in County Cork, “Indoors and outdoors the house’s character, with its inherent beauty, is in its proportions and its sureness of style.” The same could be said of this show except make it sureness of styles. According to Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson, “Each of us lives intensely within herself or himself, continuously assimilating past and present experience to a narrative and vision that are unique in every case yet profoundly communicable, whence the arts.” A visit to Chelsea Harbour Design Centre is an opportunity to live beyond yourself, embracing the arts – an exclamation mark worthy experience. And to paraphrase the late Queen Elizabeth II, this really is an Annus Mirablis for WOW!house. Tis The Season.

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Art Design People

Min Hogg + The Seaweed Collection of Wallpapers + Fabrics

Finding Material

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

“It’s sort of feeble really,” says Min Hogg. “Open the property section of any newspaper and you’ll see page after page of boring beige interiors. I blame technology. People just want to switch on this and that but can’t be bothered to look at things like furniture and paintings.” Her own flat is neither boring nor beige. Quite the opposite. It’s brimming with antiques and art and personality. And magazines. “The red bound copies on my shelves are from when I was Editor. The loose copies in boxes are all the subsequent issues.” Min was, of course, founding Editor of the highly influential magazine The World of Interiors.

“My mum would have made a brilliant Editor but she was awfully lazy,” confides Min. “She always made our houses really nice without any training, none of that, she just did it. She was a great decorator. You bet! So was my grandmother.” Min’s first plum role was as Fashion Editor of Harpers and Queen. Anna Wintour, who would later famously edit American Vogue, was her assistant. “We hated each other!” Min recalls, her sapphire blue eyes twinkling mischievously. “I was taken on by Harpers and Queen over her. She really knew I wasn’t as utterly dedicated to fashion as she was. By no means!” Nevertheless, Anna was the first to leave.

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Home Garden Brompton Square London © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Thank goodness then for an ad in The Times for “Editor of an international arts magazine” which Min retrieved from her bin. She applied and the rest is publishing history. The World of Interiors was a roaring success from day one, year 1981. “I submitted a three line CV,” she laughs. “I didn’t want to bore Kevin Kelly the publisher with A Levels and so on!” It didn’t stop her being selected out of 70 candidates. “I sort of knew I’d got the job. I ended up having dinner with his wife and him that night. I think probably of all the people who applied, I was already such friends with millions of decorators. Just friends, not that I was doing them any good or anything, I just knew them because we were likeminded.”Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Home Brompton Square London © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Studying Furniture and Interior Design at the Central Art College must have helped. “Well it was too soon after the Festival of Britain and I really didn’t get it. The only person who taught anything was Terence Conran. He was only about a year older than any of us actually. But you could tell he wasn’t into Festival of Britain furniture either which, I’m sorry, I don’t like and never did.”

“Come and have a look at the view from the kitchen, it’s really good,” says Min stopping momentarily. “It’s like living opposite the Vatican,” pointing to the plump dome of Brompton Oratory. Back in her sitting room, the view is of treetops over a garden square, a plumped up cushion’s throw from Harrods. As for choosing an interior to publish, “If I liked it, I’d do it. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t! I came to the job with this huge backlog of interior ideas. We never finished using them all. I’m blessed with a jolly broad spectrum of vision, and as you can see, although I’m not a modernist I can appreciate modernism when it’s good. I don’t like Art Nouveau either but I can get the point of a really good example of anything.”

Appropriately Min’s top floor which she bought in 1975 looks like a spread from The World of Interiors. “I don’t decorate, I just put things together. I’m a collector,” she confesses. Eclectically elegant, somehow everything fits together just so. “John Fowler was an innovator. He was frightfully clever.” So is Min. She laments the disappearance of antique shops. And junk shops. “London used to be stuffed with junk shops. Now it’s seaside towns like Bridport and Margate that have all the antique shops. There’s nothing left in London. Just the few grand ones.” Interiors may be her “addiction” but Min is interested in all art forms. She’s been an active member of the Irish Georgian Society ever since it was founded by her friends Desmond and Mariga Guinness. “I love the plasterwork of Irish country houses,” she relates, “Castletown’s a favourite.”

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Address Brompton Square London © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

With her vivacity and an email address list to die for, it’s little wonder Min’s parties are legendary. She even makes a fun filled appearance in Rupert Everett’s autobiography. But it’s not all play between her Kensington flat and second home in the Canaries. She’s still Editor at Large of The World of Interiors. Plus a few years ago she launched the Min Hogg Seaweed Collection of Wallpapers and Fabrics. It began with Nicky Haslam telling her: “I need a wallpaper for an Irish house I’m decorating. You know about colour and design.” So Nicky gave Min an 18th century portfolio of botanical seaweed prints for inspiration and off she went.

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Seaweed Collection Wallpapers © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

“Mike Tighe, the former Art Director of The World of Interiors, joined me,” she explains. “For me it was a physical thing, cutting out paper patterns by hand. Mike did all the computer work. I learnt to do a repeat and everything else. It’s funny how you can learn something if you’re interested. By pure luck the finished result looks like hand blocked wallpaper. If someone gives us a colour we can match it. I like changing the scale too from teeny to enormous.” It’s a versatile collection, printed on the finest papers, cottons, linens and velvets. Prominent American interior designers like Stephen Sills love it. The collection may be found in a world of interiors from a Hawaiian villa to a St Petersburg palace. But not in any boring beige homes.

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Seaweed Collection Fabrics © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

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Art Design Developers People Town Houses

Keizersgracht + Museum van Loon Amsterdam

Double Dutch

A myriad of canals provides Amsterdam with such a quantity of mirrors that narcissism becomes inevitable. Reflected every moment by thousands of square metres of rippling silver amalgam, it’s as if the city is constantly being filmed by its water. Consequently each canalside building lends the impression of existing as an egotist solely preoccupied by its appearance. And each canal’s own vanity is to reflect the lights dangling under the bridge arches. They, in turn, appear as shimmering pearl necklaces.

Last winter, a heavy veil of snow hung over the city. Along Keizersgracht, one of the three original canals, cars morphed into white mounds and overhead wires dripped with crystals of ice. Snow on snow on snow. Assuming you’ve recycled your Moët & Chandon bottles at De Appel Arts Centre, tackled the Rijksmuseum, skipped the queue at the Stedelijk Extension and ruminated at the Van Gogh, something of altogether more domestic proportions yet distilling elements of all three is 672 Keizersgracht. Enter Museum van Loon.

Furniture fans will get a Louis the Hooey eyeful; antiques lovers can ogle at porcelain collections spanning three centuries; while integrated contemporary art featuring the likes of light boxes by Danielle van Ark and photographs of Juliette Lewis add an experimental twist to the mix.

“The van Loon family has frozen the house exactly as it was when it opened in 1973,” announces the surprisingly youthful Museum Director and Curator, Tonko Grever. Well that puts paid to any John Fowler type debate over which period should take prominence. “As a result priceless pieces sit next to modern miscellanea. It’s still considered unusual in Amsterdam to open your house to the public,” reveals Tonko. “Maurits van Loon was the last surviving male of the family.” He died in 2005 aged 83. The first van Loons to live here were Willem and his wife Thora. His ancestor, another Willem, was one of the founders of the Dutch East India Company.

“The former butler’s son called by the house a while back,” says Tonko. “He couldn’t believe Mr van Loon just lived in an apartment on the top two floors. I reminded him that a private pad in this part of town, away from the neon nightmare that is Damrak, is still quite a status symbol! Plus it’s pretty big by modern standards.” A handful of staff runs the house now in place of 10 to 15 servants.

Narrow dizzyingly steep vertigo inducing stairs are an all too common feature of Amsterdam houses. Not here. Dr Abraham van Hagen, newly married to the metaphorically monikered Catharina Trip, an American heiress, proved he’d a flair for fabulousness when he redecorated the house in 1752 with enviable élan. Under van Hagen’s  watchful eye, the visual candy men of the day let rip on the interiors. V HAGEN is worked into the first flight of brass and iron balustrades in the spacious staircase hall and TRIP (no puns please) on the second flight. “Museum van Loon is essentially the bones of a 17th century house dressed up in 18th century gear,” Tonko comments.

The house was built in 1672 as one of a pair of symmetrical properties. Rows of windows mirror the canal through a glass darkly across a ‘flat style’ façade. The straight entablatures and cornices of this austere branch of neoclassicism replaced the jaunty twists and turns of Dutch gables from the late 18th century onwards. The architect was Adriaan Dortsman, the John O’Connell of his day; the client, a Flemish merchant named Jeremiah van Raey; the first tenant, Rembrant’s sidekick Ferdinand Bol. “The houses occupy four plots. But Dortsman struck a deal with the authorities and got four for the price of three,” relates Tonko.

A formal garden, entered via the French doors of the garden room, is an oasis of calm away from the busy bustle of the city. It was designed by Eugénie André in 1998 who was inspired by the geometric plan drawn by Jacobus Bosch on his 1679 map of Keizersgracht. When Lavender’s Blue were there, the garden was wrapped in a thick blanket of snow. Shrubs were transmogrified into white blobs and snow on snow lay heavy on the carriage house roof. Tonko notes, “It’s a different picture in summer. The garden is used as a venue for intimate opera concerts. Last June, it was one of 25 canal gardens open to the public as part of the City on the Water tourism drive.”

During renovations the foundations were underpinned with 64 new pilings. “This provided an ideal opportunity to drop the floor level of the kitchen by 20 centimetres because the basement levels were so low,” explains Tonko. Even so, they still are. “The room was then reconstructed using photos from an old servant’s album. One photo from around 1900 shows Leida the cook’s cat perched on a bench. It’s funny – the kitchen was placed at the opposite end of the house from the raised ground floor dining room. Impractical or what?”

On the first floor, surprisingly (the house is deeper than it’s wide), there are only four bedrooms. “Maurits van Loon recalled screens dividing up the bedrooms for privacy. The children had to share rooms with their siblings,” Tonko tells us. “My favourite room is the Sheep Room. You’d have no problem falling asleep there. Just count the sheep!” He’s referring to the strikingly patterned wallpaper which depicts sheep running amok amidst foliage and flowers. It was printed in Nîmes on 18th century woodblocks. Tiny square projections accommodating powder rooms flank the rear elevation.

An ostentatious Polonaise bed – the Regency type that left behind the clean lines of Georgian sobriety and tipsily headed down the helter skelter of Victorian floridity – dominates the Master Bedroom. “When the house is closed to the public, Maurits van Loon and his guests used to stay in the state rooms. Look!” points Tonko. “To the left of the bed is a modern phone. But the formality of the past is present too. A fake door next to the real bedroom door contains extra panels to align it with the fireplace.” Actually there are jib doors galore in the house concealing a rabbit warren of bookshelves, cupboards and even a staircase.

Lila Acheson Wallace, co founder of Reader’s Digest, once quipped, “A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn’t much point having it.” Since the van Loons bought this sybaritic stretch of Keizersgracht in 1884, they have managed to accumulate 150 portraits, mostly of themselves. Jan Miense Molenaer, the 17th century’s answer to Mario Testino, painted a symbolic van Loon family portrait called The Four Ages or The Five Senses which hangs in the Red Drawing Room. Who could blame them for being vaingloriously proud to have lived here for generations?