MRS BLING!
Solid gold loo seats. A platinum bathtub studded with crystals. Leopard skin wallpaper. The British interior designer to the super rich reveals the proof money can’t buy taste
Tottering out of her sprawling Sandbanks home in five-inch rainbow heels, a skin-tight silver skirt and purple chiffon blouse that’s slashed so low i worry she might have put it on backwards, Celia Sawyer doesn’t look like your average interior designer.
With her blonde curls, doll-like waist and deep mahogany tan (‘Straight from the bottle,’ she confesses), she’s more Barbie than Carol Smillie — and often finds herself chased down the street by pre-teen girls convinced that she is.
in fact, 50-year-old Celia is a successful businesswoman who’s made several million with the interiors company she set up a decade ago. But she doesn’t do any old interiors. Forget flatpack furniture and a pot of Dulux — Celia only caters to the super-rich: sheiks with billion-pound yachts to decorate; oligarchs who want their jets blinged up; and Premier League footballers whose mansions need a lick of paint.
She counts actresses and princesses, tech tycoons and retail magnates among her clients, and has developed such a reputation for extravagance that several have her on speed-dial as the ‘ Queen of Bling’. So just what do the world’s wealthiest want inside their homes?
‘gold,’ Celia admits. ‘ Lots of gold. My clients aren’t interested in trends — they want something that looks expensive. it’s got to be 24-carat, unless it’s a jet — goldplated is lighter.
‘the materials have to be the best: the finest leather, the softest velvet, everything bespoke. Jewels are big. i was asked to do a wall encrusted with diamonds, but thought it was a bit tacky.’
And tacky she is not. Don’t let appearances fool you: her outfit — from the gucci belt to her gold serpent bracelet — has been chosen to appeal to the ostentatious eye of a billionaire.
Clients, she says, ‘expect me to look like my work’. ‘i couldn’t meet them in a boring black suit, could i? Actually, i’ve always dressed like this. i go to the supermarket in these clothes.’
Her wardrobe is full of designer garb, including gold Yves Saint Laurent knee-high boots and Burberry trench coats in metallic purple, red, silver leather and blue suede. Her beauty secret, she says, is ‘not wearing my glasses — everything’s a blur when i look in the mirror’.
Despite going to all that effort, Celia doesn’t always meet her clients. Usually, there’s a phone call from an aide, a visit from a bodyguard and a stack of confidentiality contracts.
She is infuriatingly discreet, but admits her clients have included singer Cheryl Cole, football manager Harry redknapp, Chelsea player Cesc Fabregas and — with a knowing wink — ‘several royals’. (Prince Harry is doing up his Kensington Palace apartment, after all …)
the houses Celia works on range from £10 million to £100 million and are dotted all over the globe.
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feature pools, spas, cinema rooms, bowling alleys, bars and gambling rooms. She describes her style as ‘classic, contemporary and a bit quirky’. interiors take around 18 months — from sketching ideas (‘i’ll do them on napkins in Pizza express with my kids’) to finding unique objects from places as diverse as eBay and dealers in World War ii memorabilia.
For her full service, clients can expect to pay six figures. But she shops around, and even resorts to making things herself if she can do it more cheaply. ‘Some designers see it as a licence to print money, but i cut costs when i can. these people are rich, not stupid.’
Wealthy homeowners have many flamboyant requests, from gold loo seats and mosaics of their faces to gold-leaf fireplaces and leopard skin wallpaper. one highprofile project was a 24-carat gold and platinum bathtub with 250,000 crystals, for a Middle eastern buyer. ‘it cost £100,000 — i don’t think he’s used it,’ she laments. ‘now he wants one for his jet.’
But even Celia has her limits. ‘Someone wanted a revolving floor in their bar’ — she rolls her eyes — ‘and i just thought that would be nasty. they’d sit feeling dizzy.
‘it’s the same with automatic doors that open with a “swish” like a Star Wars prop. they’re a novelty. everybody switches them off after a day.’ She’s learned tactful ways of telling her clients (or, more often, their demanding wives) something is ‘dated’ or ‘not right for the space’. ‘i’m very straightforward. i give them pros and cons. i don’t want to put my name to something i’m unhappy with.’
of late, Celia has branched out from mansions, transforming a client’s superjet (an Airbus A340 which can fit 475 people) with Swarovski crystal chandeliers, gold taps and a golden bar. Her next challenge is blinging up a range rover interior.
everything, she says, is more expensive off solid ground. ‘ it costs £772,000 to put a shower on a plane [each component has to be custom-made to fit the space, and the plumbing requires complex engineering including specially adapted slimline water tanks and filtration systems] — so we’re talking mega money. the yachts i do are like floating palaces.’
Celia hasn’t always inhabited a gilded world, however. Her early life was more mundane: she lived with her accountant father, Philip, and her mother, Valerie, who worked part-time, in Dulwich, South-east London. they moved to Bournemouth and Celia, who describes herself as ‘ not a high achiever, but artistic’, left school at 15, after getting a U in her english o-Level.
She started as a dental nurse but soon ‘got fed up looking down people’s throats’ and moved to London aged 18.
inspired by her love of art, she set up a photography agency while also working as a chiropractor’s receptionist and cleaner. ‘it was interesting — i loved seeing inside people’s houses. they make so much mess. And the decor!’ She slaps her palm to her forehead.
After six months waiting for the phone to ring, Celia landed a job for ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi and the money started rolling in. She bought a flat in north London and did it up — and a friend asked her the name of her designer. When she said it was her own work, they insisted she take a look at their property down the road, then another, and another.
She was asked to do up her first footballer’s pad in 2005. ‘i was terrified,’ she admits. ‘i’d been used to flats worth a couple of hundred thousand; this was over £5 million. it took me a while to work out what a £5 million house would even look like. there were sleepless nights.’ the client loved it. Celia set up her interiors business in Mayfair two years later.
Her own home, situated on the affluent Sandbanks peninsula in Dorset — the fourth most expensive place to live in the world, after London, new York and tokyo — is worth a cool £2.4 million.
She shares the three-bedroom property with her husband of 16 years, nick, 55, a commercials director, and their two children, Lili, 18, and Jack, 14 — but this is far from a ‘normal’ family home.
Guests are greeted by three macabre mannequins in the hallway, dressed in feathered headdresses, skulls and shells.
These, Celia explains, are ‘roadkill couture’, made from bits of dead animals found by the road. ‘I’ve worn the feathered shoulder pads to a party before,’ she grins. ‘The next day I was in a “worst dressed” magazine feature. I was thrilled!’
On the wall hangs a mish-mash of art: Sex Pistols posters; black and white photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell; watercolours by the Kray twins, painted behind bars in HMP Wayland. There are horns from an aurochs (an extinct cow the size of an elephant) and silver champagne coolers, shaped like shells, which belonged to Christian Dior.
The floorboards in the living room are black and there is gold
everywhere, from a shelf of tiaras worn in the film Shakespeare In Love to a sculpture of a boy soldier holding a grenade.
Displayed on a side table is an invitation from the Prime Minister, as well as photographs of Celia with the Duke of Edinburgh at a charity event. Concertina doors lead to a white-decked patio, with stairs to a bar, private beach and guest cabin, metres from the waves. Towels bearing Celia’s monogram (gold, of course) feature on sunloungers and in the downstairs loo, too.
Celia is swinging in a hanging furlined Sixties bubble chair. ‘It fell down once; I tried to fit too many people in.’ She giggles. ‘We bought the place ten years ago and had four weeks to do it up; it’s far from perfect. We were going to knock it down, but you get lazy.’
Celia is warm, witty and self- deprecating — not at all what her WAG-worthy image may suggest. She’s not short on confidence, either. Two full-length portraits of her hang in the stairwell: on one, the word ‘ideal’ has been painted next to her face. But in this business, confidence pays.
Celia got her second job, as a dealer on the Channel 4 antiques show Four Rooms, when she came across an advert calling for ‘curious collectibles’ from the public. She sent in a photograph of herself — and was invited for a screen test the following day.
She’s starred in the show since 2011, and says fame has highs and lows. ‘I love getting recognised. People are mostly nice. I do get awful letters from old men sometimes. Real perverts, some of them.’
There was also an incident at the local yacht club in 2015, which made for unfortunate headlines when it was claimed Celia had been involved in a ‘catfight’ with another woman, who allegedly pulled out chunks of her hair.
HER
sparkly eyes turn momentarily steely. ‘I was talking to a girlfriend and suddenly that happened to me and I wasn’t aware of anything that was going on behind the scenes [Celia’s husband had, apparently, got into a row with the woman’s husband]. It wasn’t nice, but if you’re in the public eye these things can happen.’
Her family are wonderfully supportive. ‘ To them, having strange things round the house is normal. My husband works abroad quite a bit, so the three of us spend a lot of time together. My daughter — who’s studying fashion at university next year — watches me on TV, but my son thinks it’s boring. I guess he’s at that age.’
Like any working mother, it’s a juggling act. Celia is one of those maddeningly efficient women who gets up at 5am, goes for a jog, then does the school run and hits the gym. By 7.30am, she’s ready to start the day. She’s never had a nanny, relying on her mum, who lives nearby, for childcare help.
I ask how she describes herself — her LinkedIn profile boasts a lengthy list of titles, from businesswoman and philanthropist to interior designer and TV celebrity. ‘Tired,’ she says, deadpan. ‘I want to crawl back into bed by 11am.’
But she wastes no time on sleep, with her eye on her next clients — actors Michael Caine and Jack Nicholson are on her hit list.
Now she is planning what to wear when she visits HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Navy’s largest warship, for a pro bono project involving a redesign of the senior officers’ mess.
‘I was devastated when they told me I couldn’t wear heels,’ she says. ‘But I’ve got a pair of gold trainers that should do the trick. Now I’ve just got to figure out how to make a warship look glam …’