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October 10, 2010
VOL 27 NO 41
Meet 'Alice in Wonderland on acid'
The London-based designer shares her tips on how to make a room luxuriously beautiful
A Girl's Guide To Decorating (Quadrille), €23 at Urban Outfitters
When Abigail Ahern tells you that interiors this season is all about luxury and comfort and mixing up slubby velvets and merino wool with shiny silk, you're inclined to take note. The 40-year old interior designer is one of London's most feted people on the design scene, with her Islington shop, Atelier Abigail Ahern, described as "one of the coolest places to shop in the UK" by Elle Decoration.
Ahern's taste is not easy to describe but the phrase 'Alice in Wonderland on acid' has been bandied about – it's definitely anti-minimalism. What's especially alluring about the Ahern aesthetic is that she takes a frugal approach to interiors and her hands-on vibe means that turning your space into something amazing is completely do-able. Her book, A Girl's Guide to Decorating (the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, she says), completely demystifies tasks such as hanging wallpaper and painting floors but more importantly, shows how to create a deeply personal, interesting home, incorporating what you already own. But whereas a collection of books on a coffee table might look a bit messy in your average home, when Ahern does it, it looks incredibly stylish. How does she manage it? "It's all about layering. I break each room into little areas and look at them as a vignette instead of looking at the whole room and freaking out and saying 'Oh my God, where will I begin?'" she explains. "I'll start layering different books and not have everything matching. Symmetry, I'm not too big on. I like it to look lived in and not formulaic. Plus, I also play with scale, which everyone thinks is really expensive to do and whacky and designy but actually it turns any room from being really boring into something fabulous – I'll put really tiny little chairs into a room that has extraordinarily high ceilings."
Her love of interiors started at a very young age. As a five-year-old, she made her sister save up her pocket money so that they could rip up the pink carpet of their shared bedroom and paint the floorboards black.
But it was five years working on the picture desk for Terence Conran, sourcing images from photographers all around the world, that gave her a huge passion for interiors and inspired her to retrain. Now, she says, she has fingers in so many pies it's difficult for her to give all elements of her business the attention she'd like to. She's working on a new range of wallpaper and has just launched some new art and lighting pieces with an animal theme, again very tongue-in-cheek.
From her experience of running a weekly and free style clinic at her boutique, she says the biggest mistakes people are making when it comes to decorating is not embracing colour (this season, she's all about high-voltage jewel shades like burnt orange, lime green, reds, teals and saffrons) and that they actually stop decorating too soon. "I'm all about maxing it up with having as much of your personal stuff around you as is possible. People are nervous, they get their look and stick to it and they don't really 'layer' – to me that makes a house a home."
Her own house in Hackney, she says, is forever a work in progress. "The worst thing about having a store is that you see things all the time when you are travelling," she says. "Things just evolve in my home and they come and they go. The fundamentals don't change, like the paint colours which are all deep and quite inky. But chairs move into different rooms or they get recovered, or I enliven them with another textile."
The luxury look she's currently championing is easy to achieve and you don't have to spend a fortune, she says. "Gosh, I've done it in all sorts of ways in my house. I picked up flea market furniture – brown, really horrible Victorian stuff – and I sprayed it in glossy paint to give it a lacquered look. The light bounces off it and it looks really luxurious. It's all about layering – so pile heaps of cushions on the sofa and you don't have to buy a really expensive cushion; you can buy some old vintage fabric, some old silks and recover the cushions. Luxury is all those fabrics and textures that are glossy and shimmery and just look really expensive, even if they're not."
Her inspiration comes from looking at spaces, knowing that she couldn't afford to get a particular look and working back towards how she could do it herself. For example, the library in her house is covered in unusual looking shelves that she's customised herself – "I just buy standard skinny Ikea shelves, cover them with MDF, paint them the same colour as your walls, they look really 'gallery-esque' and bespoke. People go mad for them in the shop, even though we don't actually sell them," she says. One to try at home? Most definitely.
Essentials
Atelier Abigail Ahern www.atelierabigailahern.com – Ahern delivers to Ireland
Abigail's aesthetic
»Think outside the box and use every bit of space. A bar on a hallway table? Why not.
»Beautiful in themselves, mirrors are a super-stylish way to breathe new life into walls. Place a mirror by a window lamp or candle and the amount of light is instantly multiplied. When several mirrors are angled towards each other, so that the image is broken up, you have an ever changing piece of artwork.
»Shelf displays only work when objects – no matter how grand or trivial – are arranged in aesthetically pleasing rhythms. By all means mix up your arrangements by perching, say, the odd globe next to pottery, books, pebbles and jewellery – but just remember to balance the assortment with oodles of space and the occasional bit of symmetry.
»Adding a touch of unconventionality here and a dash of eccentricity there is the magic that binds a space together. So be unpredictable: juxtapose, say, a worn leather chair, a fabulously ornate mirror and a down-to-earth sisal rug.
October 10, 2010
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