'Listen to the room: Before dressing it, have a chat with it'

Colourful, pattern-based interiors might not be for everyone, but designer Kit Kemp shows how to do it with style

Sat, 29 May, 2021 - 17:35

Carol O’Callaghan

Remember Ikea’s advert a few years back with a chirpy song called, “Chuck Out Your Chintz Today”? It was like a call to arms for fans of Scandinavian design and the pared-back look.

But there’s also a saying that we ought to keep something for seven years as it might come back in fashion, or you might realise the item’s practical value which trumps superficial and rapidly changing trends.

Soaring headboards in beautiful fabrics and drapery with leading edges are characteristics of Kit Kemp's style.

With this in mind, if you’re planning on chucking away your chintz and are hell-bent on ripping out dado rails, stop and consider how this was once your style. Maybe its value has not yet been exhausted and could even be reinvented, a thought which occurred to me while browsing Design Secrets, a new book by hotelier and interior designer Kit Kemp whose projects extend from London to New York.

The Whitby Hotel in New York is the focus for intricately embroidered fabrics, rugs and embellished felts.

As someone firmly in the neutral, dado- and floral-free interiors camp, this book was destined to be a challenge for me as colour and pattern, and what’s best described as stuff, fill the photos of Kemp’s projects, especially shots of her domestic interiors.

Her hotel designs less so, of course, being free of the character our personal detritus brings.

Kit Kemp, interior designer and author of Kit Kemp: Design Secrets, published by Hardie Grant (€28.17).

But when you think about it, how often is a look lifted from a magazine, or the interior design so steadfastly trend-driven, there is nothing of the occupants’ personalities in the finished product?

It can happen with many interior styles, especially if you prefer neutral and uncluttered as it’s easy to step over the dividing line into starkness.

But even if Kemp’s distinctive style is outside your reach in the practical sense, even financially or taste-wise, it’s her by-line, adding character and style to an interior to make it your own, which offers value to us determinedly anti-colour with allergic reactions to dust-gathering ornaments.

Starting off with a chapter called Creating Character, Kemp lures us into her projects and generously gives away the names of fabrics and objects and where she got them, and while she might wax to an extreme about the value of accessories, telling us to “never underestimate the power of a cushion”, she also encourages us to re-examine the value of, among other things, dado rails. Really?

“Traditionally, dado rails were installed to prevent chair backs from damaging the walls,” she says, “but now they are often removed from rooms because they are considered outdated. However, I see a dado rail as an opportunity to combine different fabrics and materials.”

Here’s another we might not have thought about: Luminosity, which she achieves by adding a touch of metallic. These days metallics suggest the industrial look or bling, both of which are about as far away from Kit Kemp’s style as you can get, so think gilt frames instead.

Perspex is another unexpected material as we’d typically see it in ultra-contemporary interiors, but it’s an example of Kemp’s design confidence, how practised she is as a designer, and her attainment of the interiors holy grail: The timeless look, and one which is a salve for minimalism.

In cosy fashion and scorning the age of Kindle, she still loves a bookcase filled with books as intended rather than a contrived display of objet d’art which has generated the Instagram shelfie trend.

I warm more to her when I read of her love of an upholstered headboard, her designs soaring dramatically towards the ceiling, and her advocating on behalf of curtains everywhere to add a leading edge in a contrasting fabric.

You do, however, need to have evolved a close relationship with your feather duster to maintain the Kit Kemp look, unless you have a platoon of cleaners to flick it for you, something I imagine her clients have given the scale and luxury of the room-scapes.

But there’s one specific I’ll take from this book.

I often say to people to live in a room and get to know it before doing anything to it, especially if they’re harbouring a desire to demolish a wall. Kit Kemp actually has a much lovelier way of putting it when she says, “Don’t forget to listen to the room. It is so important when dressing or designing any room to have a chat with it first. What does the room need? What is the energy and feel of the space?”