DE S IGN CENTRE
LESSONS FROM THE MASTERS
A feast for the eyes it may have been, but WOW!house was more than just a spectacle – it also offered many inspiring ideas for creating utterly memorable, comfortable and functional rooms, finds Emily Brooks
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ubtleties can make or break a scheme, but they are often the things that get lost when looking at a room in the pages of a magazine: the feel of a brushed velvet; how the perfect acoustics can
create a sense of calm; a beautifully detailed trim, or a well-placed lamp. This is why industry professionals and design enthusiasts alike flocked to WOW!house, to see in person what is normally out of reach – the work of masters in their field, and how they put a space together. Stylistically, the rooms were incredibly diverse: you
could step from a cosy bedroom laden with delicate prints into a futuristic bathroom, or transition from a light and serene plant-filled living room to a moodily lit art-filled drawing room. Nonetheless, from this diversity, themes emerged: here are a few key takeaways.
CLEVER CURATION It’s called “cross-collecting” – the art of bringing together objects from across styles and eras to create an interior that looks like it has evolved over time. It was a defining feature of many of the WOW!house rooms, where an astonishing breadth of objects were on show, from an ornate 18th-century mirror in the Colefax and Fowler Drawing Room designed by Emma Burns and Philip Hooper of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, to a kitsch gnome-shaped glass match-holder in the GP & J Baker Morning Room designed by Rita Konig. Creating a sense of intrigue is the name of the game.
The Schumacher Garden Room designed by Campbell- Rey contained shell obelisks that looked like they could be several centuries old but were in fact by contemporary
maker Tess Morley, Shalini Misra’s Entrance Foyer featured a chandelier by Thierry Jeannot made from recycled plastic bottles – and who could forget the rows of whimsical hats by French artist Mimi de Biarritz in Kit and Minnie Kemp’s Day Room? Like many of the designers, Paolo Moschino and
Philip Vergeylen used their personal collections to decorate their Drawing Room, so it was no wonder that it felt convincingly like someone lived here. “A lot of pieces come from our home, and they will go back there,” said Moschino. “We wanted it to feel like ‘us’.” There were pieces from the showroom, and objects spanning the past few centuries, but also a gogotte – a sculptural sandstone formation that is not thousands, but millions of years old.
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