Mr Posh’s waspish guide to oligarch bling

A harem clad in black underwear. Chintz galore. And the nagging fear of ending up in ‘poisoned underpants territory’... NICKY HASLAM’s tales of being interior designer to super-rich Russians

AS STYLIST to the rich and famous, Nicky Haslam’s views on what is fashionable – or vulgar – hold huge sway. Not surprisingly, his observations on his Russian oligarch clients, many of them now sanctioned as chums of Vladimir Putin and with their mansions targeted, are particularly piquant.

WHEN Roman Abramovich asked me to help design his house in London’s Belgravia, I put a great big plaster classical statue of a pipe player in the middle of the drawing room. However, I hadn’t realised Russians associate statues with museums and the then Chelsea FC owner hated it. What he really wanted, like all men, was a leather sofa and a huge television. He is such a polite man that he never told me, but I heard his face fell when he walked in and saw it. He hired another decorator from California to re-do it all.

It’s crass to discuss money with oligarchs but they paid very handsomely and regularly, never quibbling over bills. Some just took a little extra time because, perhaps, the money required laundering. Maybe it came from Russia, was washed in Cyprus and redirected to the Cayman Islands before ending up with me.

Oligarchs are often mocked for liking gold toilets, but billionaire banker Petr Aven was a fan of chintz. I created chintz-covered columns for his palatial Surrey home in a beautiful pattern: a pale green background with pink, white and red roses.

Oleg Deripaska, the industrialist who once hosted George Osborne and Peter Mandelson on his vast yacht, was my first oligarch client. He asked me to do up his penthouse Moscow apartment. It was a bachelor pad and his only specific request was for dancing poles for girls. Overall, we made it masculine with strong, dark fabrics – a lot of white, grey and, I’m afraid to say, beige. I hate the word ‘beige’. Let’s say faun. Not intimidatingly masculine. Just invitingly masculine.

For one client, I built a swimming pool with a grotto made of glittering stone and four urns sitting atop columns emitting smoke. The urns were bronze with a smoke machine inside, giving the impression of real fire. Usually, swimming pools are boring. For me, they must be very simple or rather complicated. Certainly, no horrible murals.

When I arrived at the chateau in the South of France owned by Russian investor and former Putin crony Sergei Pugachev, I was greeted by a raft of viragos with beetroot-red hair in black underwear sitting around a dining table. An extraordinary scene – these women were apparently his court and they produced some disgusting sausagey food. But then he and my friend, the beautiful Alexandra Tolstoy, separated, and that was the end of that.

I had no idea that by associating with such powerful men, I was dancing along the edge of a volcano. Looking back, though, one wrong move and I could have been in poisoned underpants territory.

Once, I was in the running to do up the gigantic mansion called Witanhurst in Highgate, North London, which had been bought by Russian billionaire Andrey Guryev through an offshore company. It was a beast, the largest non-royal home in London, with 104 bedrooms or something. It was simply daunting. Thank God, the job fell through, because I don’t know what I would have done with it. The building should have been a hotel and is now valued at £300 million.

Rich Russians wanted quality, not glitz. Everything had to be

well made. Nothing should be ersatz or trashy. They were after luxury rather than ostentation. In particular, specified solid door handles, light switches and lighting fittings. You can tell when a light switch is cheap by the feel of it. I always use a very good supplier in Paris. I expected these billionaires to have hundreds of minions, but I saw very few domestic staff. That said, one oligarch I worked with had a chef with about 18 boxes of knives and hired a security team to guard every door of his apartment. Very Russian.

Russian taste is thought a byword for vulgarity, but the rich ones had a particularly keen eye for the best art. After Roman Abramovich bought Lucian Freud’s enormous nude known as Big Sue for £17 million in

2008, I installed it in his London home. It was taller than most of the rooms. However monstrous Putin is, it should not be forgotten that so much Russian culture is wonderful – the art, the porcelain, the architecture and music.

One oligarch asked me to turn a huge outdoor terrace into a winter garden that he could use all year round. We made vast over-lifesize statues of halfdressed Greek goddesses in fibreglass to withstand the brutally cold Moscow winter. They were quite a sight.

I don’t enjoy decorating yachts. Bulkheads get in the way of the design and there are always limitations about what one can move around because, after all, the boat needs to be able to sail. You can’t just say: ‘Move that staircase three metres to the left because it is in the way of my dining room.’ I find almost all oligarch-type yachts look the same, which gets rather boring.

I met Abramovich’s adorable wife Dasha at one of socialite Paris Hilton’s parties in Los

Angeles. Everyone wanted to be her friend. A few months later, she rang and asked me to do their London home. They had no furniture, but were buying paintings. I wanted to make it chic so I steered away from anything twiddly-widdly English houseywousey. We made it very stylish with screens painted in the style of the Spanish artist Salvador Dali’s surrealist work, wonderful columns, low sofas, large lamps.

Andrey Guryev’s enormous Moscow apartment – with its mile-long sofas and walls in the master suite covered in 500 metres of silk fringe – has got to be one of the weirdest jobs I’ve ever done. But then, blow me, it won a prize for the best apartment in Russia and featured across several pages in a glossy magazine. I was even more embarrassed.