INTERIORS
designed as a fish restaurant, because they serve meat too, and says it’s following a trend for simpler, less fussy dining. “I mean I said to her [Kate], I will be here now,” says Nina. “It’s quite nice to be able to zip along there and have a nice piece of delicious fish, all fresh, and know that you can be out in an hour. I think that’s going to be rather fun, I’m looking forward seeing that.”
When Nina is working on hotels, she tries to put herself in the guests’ place.
“I travel a lot, so I always think, what do I want? And I can’t be all that different to everybody else.
“And then I think, what sort of colours would I like and what’s going to work and how’s it going to flow from everything else, because I think that’s very important – you don’t want to jump from one hysterical colour to another.”
As well as her interior design business, Nina has a retail and gift shop
in Walton Street and fabric and wallpaper collections distributed internationally by Osborne & Little.
But it might never have happened if she had been better at making tea when she worked for John Fowler at Sybil Colefax & Fowler, aged 19. “He asked me to make the tea, which I made such a nonsense of because I didn’t realise how you made tea for 18 people in one small teapot. And so that was such a failure he said ‘please don’t ever make the tea again’,” she says with a grin. “So I became bag carrier instead of tea-maker, which is a huge step forwards in the interior design world.” And then we’re squeezing past small dogs on the stairs, trying not to let them out of the front door, as we walk down to look around her retail store.
Funnily enough, one of the first things she shows me is a teapot. 42
Classical style: the redesigned lounge at the Draycott Hotel
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