by I think the process of styling of a room is very similar to the decoration of a body, ”says Lucinda Chambers, the legendary fashion style, who is known for her playful approach to color, pressure and texture.
Joyous is certainly the word that comes to mind in Chamber’s house in Shepherds Bush, where a kaleidoscope of the color develops behind an otherwise ordinary Victorian facade.
There are walls full of ceramics and art, and happy yellow and red spaces that are so much that they cannot help but raise ghosts.
“I see every surface as a color option, regardless of whether it is an envelope board, the inside of a closet or a blanket,” says Chambers. “I get restless and I would honestly paint the back of the door if I had nothing else to do.”
Of course, she has a lot to do until 2017 for 25 years as a fashion director at British Vogue before she says a lot about her practical approach in decoration before she and the e-commerce platform Collagerie Mitgruten-Aber. She is a woman of projects – everything from painting to a mosaic table from ceramic victims – and her house, which has developed slowly but slowly for over 30 years, is proof of this.
Chambers and her husband Simon Crow bought the Victorian terrace in the early 1990s and raised their three boys there. Apart from the fact that you triple the size of the kitchen to create a charming space that runs the width of the house, you kept the bones as they were. There is a kitchen, a dining room and a living room on the ground floor. The salon and the main bedroom are located on the first floor with four additional bedrooms on the upper two floors.
“I am actually very afraid of spatial transformation,” admits Chambers, who grew up through an ironic turn and her mother down the walls of the houses in which they lived. “She would buy these poky old houses and start cutting down the walls to create completely different rooms. She was brilliant in it.”
On the contrary, the changes in Chamber’s house were referred to by color and what they modestly referred to as “layers of love and disorder”.
Some rooms, such as the electric, yellow dining room and the pompeii-reduced salon, have had the same color for about 20 years. “I am asked what the yellow is so often, but I can’t even remember now,” she says with a laugh. “I am not decorated for the will, but always when things go beyond shabby.”
Similarly, it never uses color for color: “I spend a lot of time to think about how we will use the room and whether the color has to be soft and calm or lively and energetic.” Sometimes it is completely enveloped, like in the television room, in which the chambers painted the walls in a warm red to delete the cozy appeal of the room. “It almost feels like it is on fire,” she enthuses. “It used to be the play room of our boys, but since we rejected it, it has become a bit like a TV dinner for us.”
While the house is brilliant, Chambers confesses that it rarely thinks about the color relationships between the rooms. “I don’t think much about how one room leads to the next, but there are color threads that hold everything together,” she explains. “It’s a bit like I am getting dressed and I could wear a green eyeliner to absorb the green of my socks.” Rots not only excite on walls, but also in the candy lawn strip of the dining room sofas, the powerful red AGA in the kitchen (a randomly relic of the previous owners) and the carpets that are layered on the floor of the salon.
Yellow is another color that weaves throughout the house, not only on the walls of the dining room, but also as a border above the Dado rail in the television room and on the bathtub in the bathroom of Chambers. “I painted it 30 years ago,” she says of the bathroom, which is sitting under a wall and is painted in a shadow of gardener cord.
“I actually painted this room turquoise and it was just so terribly restless that I painted it back the next day,” she says. “I have failed a lot of color over the years, but so they train what is right.”
While the world of fashion is one of the trends, Chambers is not a passionate follower. “There are trends that I see with interest, but I am much more interested in developing my own relationship with style and getting my inspiration of nature or exhibitions,” she explains. “It was the same when I was fashionable. I would never really look at the catwalk and was much more interested in creating my own story for a story.”
Like the filming she has mastered, it is particularly good at introducing elements that do not match in an interior. “I can’t endure anything,” she explains.
A typical example is one of her guest rooms a current project that she has painted in snatching hours in a few weeks-where she replaced the graffitated walls from the days of her son with a palette of chiffon grays and blues for the walls and tobaccesses for the blanket, which she put with a candle.
“Everything got a bit of shy taste and I decided that it took a modern orange chair to throw things off,” she says. “I explained my dilemma to some friends that we visited on a weekend, and they happened to have this electric chair in their attic that they wanted to get rid of. They are prey, but perfect.” As much as the house is shaped by color, it is also defined by the collections for which it is hosted. Many of them have also emerged from the urge to venture out of their comfort zone.
“I started collecting studio pottery about 10 years ago because I found it quite ugly and challenging, but I loved it,” she says. “I like it when something sharpens the mind.”
Ceramics plays in life in life in life in life in life and there is no space in which a vase or a plate does not decorate a surface, including in its bathroom, not with the wall of colorful plates. For many years, the dining room has been less a place for eating and more a stop for ceramic before finding yourself elsewhere – and it recently used an empty wall in the kitchen by installing a chest of turquoise shelves to keep even more ceramic. “I had to find a way to put it on the wall from the kitchen floor,” she says with a grin.
“I am a total magpie, and my strength and weakness is that I see the meaning of many things,” says Chambers, who spends weekends and public holidays that browse through cars and markets. “I love to push myself and buy things that I don’t necessarily see in my house,” she says, quoting a poster from the 1970s that she recently bought as an example. A collector who may be, but she is not valuable at all if she has a clear trip when the house reaches a turning point. “I can see when I have to have a disappointment.”
For a house that feels so relevant for today, it is remarkable that many parts have been the case for a few decades or longer. It is also a house where parts, no matter how small it may be, constantly change. Parts come and go and layers develop – and of course that is an essential part of its charm.
Out of New English interiors: at home with today’s creative By Elizabeth Metcalfe, Photography by Dean Hearne, Frances Lincoln, £ 28, now out
