MAX OUT THE DETAILS

Emma Grant on the case for opulence

London-based decorator Emma Grant, 32, got the taste for opulence in design from family holidays in Nice, where she discovered Villa Kerylos, a Greek revival house in Beaulieu. ‘It’s a magnificent representation of an Ancient Greek villa,’ she says of the home commissioned by a classical scholar in the early 1900s. ‘Every detail of the interior has been meticulously considered with no expense spared.’

With an eye for repurposed materials, rare textiles, antiques and fine, bespoke detailing, Grant deals mostly in residential projects and complete renovations. She’s currently updating the kitchen in her own Cotswolds home, with a distinctive mottled reddish-pink limestone worktop quarried in Devon and has nabbed a large-scale Italian, 18th-century silk and gilt thread embroidery for herself, which she may have usually kept for clients. ‘The detail is extraordinary. It would have originally been woven into the back of a sofa but having now been framed it looks fabulous on the wall.’

Her main MO is to ‘move away from whitewash, open-plan living’, and she thinks we need to be ‘celebrating living in small-scale quarters, with more outlandish designs for dressing windows’.

She believes that unique antique sourcing adds a real flair but when you’re working towards tight deadlines, it becomes ‘a luxury when given the opportunity to hold off for something really unique to emerge. I feel more often than not the best pieces are acquired via very patient digging through auction catalogues and markets.’

“We need to move away from whitewash, open-plan living”