The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Entente cordiale
One house, two very different styles
WHEN THE FRENCH interior designer Jean-louis Deniot met Eloise Goldstein, there was an instant understanding. ‘The first thing Eloise said to me was that she didn’t like recessed lighting and that she adored Gio Ponti,’ he says. ‘I immediately knew we could work together.’
The encounter took place a decade ago, when Eloise and her husband, Peter, were looking for a designer to decorate their pied-à-terre in Paris. ‘I remember Jean-louis sweeping in and winning me over,’ recalls Goldstein. ‘All the suggestions he made were just fabulous.’ The results were so successful that when Goldstein decided their London base needed a redesign, she knew who to ask.
The Victorian house in Belgravia had previously been decorated by Goldstein herself, in a colour palette of beige and chocolate, with lots of Christian Liaigre furniture. ‘My husband thought it was perfectly good enough,’ she says, ‘but, in comparison with our apartment in Paris, I thought
it was completely inadequate. This is where we live, and so I wanted to feel that same sense of pleasure here.’
At 43, Deniot is at the top of his game. His current residential projects are dotted around the world, from India to Istanbul, Tangiers to Thailand. Last year, he also launched a furniture line for the American brand Baker, inspired by 20th-century designs and the de corative style of hi s native France. ‘I wanted the pieces to have a sexy elegance that makes them feel timeless,’ he says.
For him, one of the main drawbacks of the Belgravia property was its layout. ‘It was a series of small rooms that weren’t really connected.’ In reconfiguring it, his main goal was to endow the house with a sense of grandeur. He improved the proportions, installed mirrored double doors and topped openings with broken pediments.
He also replaced traditional fire-
‘It’s my dream room. You just want to lie there all afternoon, doing nothing’
pl a c e s wi t h more c o n t e mp o r a r y designs. ‘I wanted to give the decor vigour and excitement,’ he explains. The chimney breast in the sitting room has been back-painted to resemble a worn, vintage mirror, while the fire surround in the master bedroom, inset with glistening brass rods, is intended to look ‘jewel-like’. ‘I just can’t imagine people sleeping in front of a big block of marble,’ says Deniot. ‘It ’s too cold and austere.’
One of Goldstein’s specific requests was for colour, so Deniot suggested a neutral palette lifted by tones of blue and green. To satisfy Peter’s request for a comfortable, practical environment for the couple and their three children, Demiot used elegant but hard-working materials, such as the faux-travertine paper lining the hallway and staircase walls. ‘It ’s wonderful,’ says Goldstein. ‘When the staircase used to be painted, people would constantly brush past and leave horrible marks.’
Another idea she loves is the semicircular sofa arrangement in the first-floor sitting room. ‘It makes the room look so much bigger than it is,’ she says. ‘ You
walk in and think, “Wow!”’ Her favourite space, however, i s the adjacent TV room, which has a sofa with a huge, four-metre -long custom-made mattress, covered in an artfully selected array of cushions. ‘It’s a room where the family didn’t sit down once in the 12 years they had previously lived in the house,’ notes Deniot. Nowadays, Goldstein is happy to while away hours there. ‘It ’s my dream room,’ she says.
‘The sitting room looks bigger than it is – you walk in and think, “Wow!”’
‘You just want to lie there all afternoon, doing nothing.’
Goldstein is passionate about contemporary ar t, and her colle ction, which has been put together with the help of her best friend, art advisor Jane Suitor, includes paintings by the likes of Glenn Ligon, Albert Oehlen and Glenn Brown. One work that proved problematic was the large black-and-white