The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
House style
Why Sophie Ashby is interior design’s current darling
The new darling of the interiors world
it was early on that sophie ashby decided she wanted to be an interior designer .‘ My parents have moved house an obscene amount of times, and by the age of 19 i’d lived in 14 houses,’ she explains. ‘i spent my whole childhood viewing houses, so i was interested in property from a young age.’
after studying history of art in the UK, she spent a term at Parsons design school in new york. Back in london she worked for two interior designers before making the decision to set up her own practice, studio ashby, four years ago at the age of 25.
‘i thought i’d just try my best to turn over a couple of projects a year,’ says ashby, who started the company with her laptop in a coffee shop.‘i just wanted the freedom to be able develop my own style. By that po in ti had figured out w ha ti liked .’
other people appreciated her fresh take, and within three years she had a team of 11 working on plush penthouse sin london and hotels in Cape town, where she lived until the age of 12 (her mother is south african).
Her peripatetic childhood meant t hat ashby ‘got a lot of experience of moving around andre arranging my room to make it comfortable ’. Her design formula of earthy colours, judi- ciously placed hits of pattern plus ‘lots of plants and art’ is simple, and in her hands it is also very effective.
‘i don’t do interior design in the most commercially minded way,’ says ashby, whose current work includes apartments at Greenwich Peninsula and an up scale nigerian restaurant inst Ja mes’s. ‘i go to fa r too many places per project – for some there might be 300 suppliers. the way t hat i t hink about it is that i’m a collector, and i just try to imagine that it’s my house.’
this attention to detail, allied with innate good taste, means ashby would be at the top of my list of decorators if i had the cash to splash. studioashby.com