DE S IGN CENTRE
to the acclaimed designer and her team and sees her going back to her roots, breathing new life into London townhouses. Yet the couple haven’t set out to be disruptors;
instead, they've followed their creative and commercial instincts, whether it’s installing a towering orange juicer in the basement bar at Ham Yard near Piccadilly Circus, or a kitchen garden and beehives on the roof terrace above. At the Warren Street Hotel, many suites lead on to private balconies planted like an English cottage garden, completed with hurdle fencing, that couldn’t be in greater contrast to its views over New York’s Financial District. Nor have the Kemps attempted to reinvent
any of the wheels fundamental to the workings of hospitality; their hotels might be highly distinctive, but they are built on the same foundations as any highly successful venture. “I just want to make our guests comfortable,” the designer told the travel writer Fiona Duncan. Yet comfort, for them, is about more than just pocket springs, power showers and pillows – it’s about spaces and staff that are allowed to have their own personalities, ensuring that guests feel at ease. She sees art and craft as fundamental to this, saying that “so often a hotel bedroom can feel a bit lonely, but something made with loving hands, such as a ceramic bowl or hand-painted frame with a poem inside, can bring an inner smile and arouse a sense of curiosity and interest to a room.”
What has been exciting for this creative and
highly industrious couple has been the twists and turns of the journey. “What I learnt very early on is that you have to keep moving; each challenge equips you with the knowledge that is essential for the next,” she writes in the introduction to her fifth book, Design Stories, published earlier this year by Rizzoli. “Momentum is also vital because attitudes are constantly evolving.”
“A HOTEL BEDROOM CAN FEEL A BIT LONELY, BUT SOMETHING MADE WITH LOVING HANDS CAN BRING AN INNER SMILE”
Her influence has reached far beyond hotels
and to date has spanned not just fabrics and wallpaper but also tableware and furniture. It has been fuelled, too, by her books, her blog and the rooms she has created in showhouses, including the inaugural WOW!house at Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour
in 2022. Yet there’s a nuance to her
impact; whereas many influential designers create an aesthetic blueprint that others follow, Martin Waller, the founder of Andrew Martin (with which she has collaborated on collections), points out that her style has never been copied, perhaps because
it is so instinctive. Instead, her impact is that she has empowered others to follow their own aesthetic instincts, finding things that they love and weaving them into the warp and weft of their lives. While Kemp’s passion for her subject is infectious,
her approach is far from prescriptive. You won’t find any dos and don’ts of decorating on her blog, Design Thread. Instead, like every good teacher, she both inspires and leads by example; it’s a knack evident in her long-held enthusiasm for the work and design philosophy of the artists of the Bloomsbury Group. Yet it’s not a passion that has led her to slavishly recreate the feel of Charleston, the East Sussex home of the circle’s key protagonists, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Instead, she takes inspiration from the way that they treated a room as a canvas. “I love their colour palette with a tiny bit of lamp black within, which suits our beautiful British light as well as dusky blues, artichoke greens, damask rose, burnt orange and aubergine. It’s both moody and uplifting. Also, I love the way painted furniture gives a sense of wit and new life,” she says. But, as ever, she has embraced the influence and made it her own. “Pastiche,” she says, “is never OK.” The latter is a philosophy that infuses her
approach to designing fabrics and wallpapers, which she has created with vim and vigour in recent years. Her second collection in collaboration with GP & J Baker launched at London Design Week 2026 – a highlight of
the interior design
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© Simon Brown
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