BELLA FREUD
As the British designer celebrates 30 years in fashion, she translates her covetable retro-leaning and boundarypushing vision into her new West London home.
As the British designer celebrates 30 years in fashion, she translates her covetable retro-leaning vision into her new home
There is a cinematic quality to the way daylight distils into every corner of British fashion designer Bella Freud’s West London apartment, allowing key furniture, sculptures and artworks to take centrestage in an otherwise uncluttered interior. “I wanted it to be quite spare in feeling and not too done,” says Freud. “With this kind of dreamy light and soft shadows, it feels almost playful.”
The home sits in the back lot of a former industrial warehouse, which Freud had previously converted into a studio on the ground floor and a house above where her former husband, writer James Fox, still lives. For this most recent addition behind the warehouse development, the designer worked with architect Maria Speake to create a 172-square-metre box, with a room on top for her son Jimmy, to replace the myriad sheds formerly occupying the space.
“When Maria suggested we create an interior courtyard, with steel-framed windows salvaged from Battersea Power Station, I thought it sounded a bit fancy, but it was such a good idea,” says Freud. Light filters down through just one large skylight over the central space, which features almost threemetre-high ceilings. “Although it’s entirely landlocked and only top-lit, it doesn’t feel confining because all those windows allow Bella to be constantly looking through from one space to another,” says Speake.
There’s just the bare minimum of furniture — a generously sized vintage white sofa, a pink ottoman originally bought for Freud’s fashion boutique, an old Ikea kitchen table, a basic bed with a good mattress, and a cane chair. The chair reminds Freud of one designed by her architect grandfather Ernst, son of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. There are also precious pieces inherited from her late father, British artist Lucian Freud. These include sketches, a battered old leather chair (on loan from her sister Esther, author of the semi-autobiographical hit novel Hideous Kinky), his painting trolley (still wrapped in plastic wrap) and a box of brushes — the scent of oil paint and turps embedded in their bristles — that sits casually on the floor. “The space works with not so many things in it, apart from loads of books and art,” says the fashion designer.
Against this backdrop, Freud uses her home almost like a work tool, shooting lookbooks for new collections. “I feel at ease here,” she says, “using a specific corner to make the right context for how I want the model to look, to create a certain mood.”
Freud celebrates 30 years in the fashion business this year. She’s renowned for sharp, tomboy tailoring softened by the streamlined curves of a feminine ››
‹‹ silhouette. But more recently, it’s her play with words such as ‘Ginsberg is God’, ‘Fairytale of New York’, and ‘Loving’, emblazoned on everything from jumpers to candles that has taken her name around the globe. Her signature ‘1970’, set within a white stripe, is “a bit like a punk version of Chanel’s string of pearls,’ Freud recently told The Business of Fashion. “It’s very flattering, so people continue to buy it.”
In her own home, the designer manipulates this sense of colour play for both walls and floors — such as the way the green casts a satisfying glow over everything. The intensity of these rich hues takes up a lot of visual space. “So I didn’t want to clutter it up with too much stuff,” she says. “I don’t like anything too ‘nice’ — I like things to be smooth, with a kind of gleam, but also to have a point of view. I like to look for the tension, the punk rock in things.”
Speake counters this with her talent for repurposing reclaimed materials. (She is also cofounder of London salvage specialist Retrouvius with her husband Adam Hills.) Striped marble lends a textural feel akin to basket weave; Art Deco mirrored panels, rescued from the Unilever building in London, bring an energetic resonance; a floral curtain now pads out one of the kitchen walls. “When you sit in front of it, you feel like you’re in a forest,” says Speake. “Although everything is recently built, none of it feels overly new.”
The two have worked together for years on the designer’s previous homes as well as Freud’s Marylebone boutique. Opened in 2015, the store showcases her men’s and women’s fashion collections and homewares, including candles, cushions and china made in collaboration with artist Gillian Wearing. Freud and Speake have also curated a duplex apartment inside the old West London BBC Television Centre. “The way Maria thinks of space is how I think of clothes,” says Freud. “She suggests wonderful things about how to live; I can explain how to make a garment. What I know about creating silhouette in fabrics, she can do that with a building.”
For Freud’s new home, the collaborative result is a space that is “easy to think in,” she says. “It’s very calm, peaceful and quiet.” Freud readily admits it’s probably not her forever home, but right now, “it suits this particular period in my life. It’s the most wonderful place to be — as soon as I’m home, I feel better.” bellafreud.com; retrouvius.com
“I like things to be smooth, with a kind of GLEAM, but also to have a point of view. I like to look for the tension, the punk rock in things”