Force of Nature
You know her as an interior designer, hotelier and former Bond girl, but Anouska Hempel tells DAVEN WU she could have been a Chinese empress in a past life
ANOUSKA HEMPEL DOESN’T enter a room so much as she blows in — a whirling force of nature that is barely contained by the chair she eventually settles into after a perfunctory, distracted greeting. She bristles with energy, her restless energy constantly shifting as kohl-lined eyes dart around the room, taking in details, noting everything and missing nothing. You can almost see her make mental notes of what to correct and what else needs to be done after she’s done with this interview.
Around us is a construction site, a work-in-progress that come will soon coalesce into the 45room Duxton Club. This is the legendary British designer’s first project in Singapore with hotelier Satinder Garcha, who she first met at a polo match and whose Nassim Road house she decorated. Dust motes float listlessly, their presence all the more visible against a backdrop of dark hues and black glossy surfaces. Midsentence, Hempel erupts from her chair to deal with questions from contractors and what appears to be a small corps of English assistants.
Someone appears from the wings, and she’s off. Her aide-decamp, a tall, genial Englishman, barely looks up from the laptop he’s busily tapping on, his slight bemused smile telling you this is all in a day’s work at your typical interior design studio.
Except, that imperious blonde dervish out there fixing problems and cross-examining her contractors is not your typical interior designer. She has created some of the most celebrated interiors for some of the world’s richest clients. She is also Anouska, Lady Weinberg, her title courtesy of her husband Sir Mark Weinberg, the fi nancial tycoon.
And she is a former Bond girl. Yes, really. In her twenties, she parlayed her high cheekbones, startlingly vivid eyes and thick blonde mane into a few scenes in the 1969 caper On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which she followed up a year later with an
equally vampish turn, fangs and all, in Scars of Dracula.
She once freely admitted to Vanity Fair she was a second-rate actress, but her Plan B was that she also knew she had the makings to be a really good interior designer. And she knew this because she’d always had a point of view. Growing up on a sheep ranch in New Zealand, she was forever rearranging furniture. Over the years, with no formal training, she developed the visual acuity to put disparate patterns and colours together in a counter-intuitive way to produce a result that was, with hindsight, maddeningly obvious.
The project that brought her lasting fame was Blakes hotel, which she opened in 1978 in London’s South Kensington. By any yardstick, it was a groundbreaking project — a jawdropping Orientalist fantasy of lush brocades, silken throws and a glorious A-list clientele of rock and movie stars, royalty and celebrities.
Her studio took off and over the next four decades, Hempel has continued rolling out hotels, residential and commercial projects in Hong Kong, Paris, Santiago, London and Florence. She’s worked on showrooms for Van Cleef & Arpels and Louis Vuitton. She’s done restaurants, gardens and even a yacht. She’s currently working on a Mughal garden in Istanbul, a beach house in Long Island, and two estates in England, as well as products from lamps to chairs.
Clients canny enough to see past her formidable reputation have been rewarded with memorable interiors that combine louche decadence with a disciplined approach to textures and colours, and a timeless patina of style and warmth. Her sense of detailing is both extraordinary and uncompromising, and because she’s learnt her craft through sheer natural talent and a unique taste level, she doesn’t take her aesthetic reference from any conventional source. Her inspiration, she says as she settles back into the chair at the Duxton Club, “comes out of my head. I have quite a classical style. It’s something that lasts.”
Achieving such a result is, of course, no walk in the park. A conservationist at heart, for every new project she searches, like an actress, for a backstory, a cue that makes sense for the space. For the Duxton Club, for instance, she’s imagined a Chinese girl who believes she is an empress and who comes into her own destiny at the hotel. It explains the lashings of red, gold, black and yellow against a backdrop of stylised Oriental screens, canopy beds, calligraphy wallpaper and oversized golden fans. It’s a gloriously romantic fantasist concoction that’s straight out of Hempel’s playbook.
“I was totally a Chinese empress in a past life,” Hempel says firmly, a startling statement that she follows up moments later with a candid but imperially dismissive confession: “I’m a control freak. A perfectionist. But that’s not a flaw. I don’t care.”
And she really doesn’t. She remains as fearless as the day she opened Blakes 40 years ago. “I don’t think anybody can be a designer. It’s not for everybody,” she adds, no doubt thinking of her own peripatetic career path.
In that context, her assessment of young interior designers working today is characteristically trenchant. “I’ve not seen anything that has stopped me in my tracks and I’ve said, ‘ My god, this is brilliant!’” she says at first, then reconsiders. “Maybe André Fu’s work at The Upper House in Hong Kong.”
For the rest, Hempel feels many young designers make the mistake of trying too hard to be individualistic. “They do strange things. Like they make a wonky three-legged chair. They don’t realise they’ll go out of fashion very quickly. You need to build up a collection of things that you really like, as opposed to something amusing. So, if you like three-legged
chairs, put 10 in a room. Don’t just use one! Make a collection.”
A design bugbear is what Hempel calls contemporary minimalism. “If you’re going for that aesthetic, you have to do it perfectly. It has to be seamless, and that’s where you’re more likely to go wrong. Except for people like Tadao Ando, contemporary minimalism is a shortcut to nothing.” She pauses and stares. She does this occasionally, giving you the full force of her attention, being utterly present in the room and the conversation with every fibre, as if you’re the only person in the world she wants to speak to right now. The effect is intoxicating, and you begin to understand how she has stayed at the top of her game for so long.
Her own assessment of her longevity is that “you have to be mad to do this. I have no idea about making a living. I don’t do any of this to make money.”
How then, I wonder, does she know if she’s doing it right? Or, more to the point, given her exacting judgment of this generation’s designers, how does Anouska Hempel, the legendary interior designer, know if she’s any good? By what standards does she judge her own work?
She gives a casual shrug that you sense is accompanied by an unvoiced mantra: I don’t care. Instead, Hempel answers: “I have no idea if something I do is good. But I do know when something is wrong. When it’s not done properly. But what’s important is that you keep going, and doing what you love.”
She waves a hand around her as, at the end of our interview, we walk towards the main entrance of the Duxton Club. Plastic sheets cover low-slung furniture and loose wires peek out of walls. “You have to be so hands-on. This morning, I actually cut holes in the cardboard hoarding covering the glass doors. People couldn’t see out otherwise! I found the solution. That’s the sort of thing you have to do.”
And with that, she turns around, straight-backed and charged with energy, and disappears into the dust and covers. There’s much to do. An empress is coming, and Lady Weinberg is on the case.