Back to his roots
Top hairdresser Tim Hartley returned to his native county after the pandemic. Jacqueline Hunter takes a look round his stunning Yorkshire home. Pictures by Jonathan Gawthorpe.
CHANGE is pioneered by the rebels and nonconformists, it’s said – a maxim that Tim Hartley’s life exemplifies. The York-born hairdresser, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday by inviting 65 friends to a champagne-fuelled dinner at Brancusi restaurant on Micklegate, is no stranger to disruption. Early in his threedecade career with Vidal Sassoon, Hartley unleashed a creative streak that set him on a path to global success.
As a fearless young stylist at Sassoon’s Leeds salon in the early 1980s, he created the groundbreaking “Kabuki” and “Buccaneer” cuts that were the antithesis of the brand’s famous bobs. “We needed to move with the times, these styles caused a stir, and soon everyone wanted them,” Hartley recalls today from his home in rural Yorkshire. He was ultimately moved to London, becoming a creative director for Vidal Sassoon himself in 1990.
When House of Sassoon – the new HQ of the global hair brand and its teaching academy – had its Soho launch party last October, special tributes were paid to the only three people ever to hold the international creative director title under Vidal Sassoon. Along with the late Roger Thompson, and Christopher Brooker, Tim Hartley was one of that trio.
It was on work trips around the US, Canada, Europe and Japan with the Sassoon team, where he created hair looks for models such as Kate Moss and Kristen McMenamy, and Hollywood stars including Faye Dunaway, that he developed a love of Modernism, which was a driving design ethos for his mentor Vidal.
Since then, Hartley has built up a stunning collection of modern classics: a Willy Rizzo table; a chaise longue by Eileen Gray; a 1968 Fritz Hansen egg chair; and a 1970s Italian Maralunga sofa and armchair from Cassina. All these (and many more) are far from being museum pieces but rather part of a comfortable home where friends and family drop by – and might even get a Tim Hartley haircut while perched on a vintage factory stool in the kitchen.
“My first piece was a 1950s white Bonzanini table, of which I became custodian when Vidal and his wife Ronnie Sassoon decided to sell it through a shop in London. They asked me to house it until the new owner could collect it, but of course I loved it and became the new owner. It's with me to this day.” Hartley moved to his current home, a house rebuilt on the original footprint of an old school a few miles outside York, in 2022, after the pandemic led him to reconsider his future.
“It was all going swimmingly but Covid put the kibosh on everything,” he says of the international freelance career he had built up after leaving Sassoon’s in 2010 and mourning Vidal’s death two years later. “I was about to do a show in Mexico City for 4,000 hairdressers, but suddenly the likelihood that someone in that audience would have Covid put all my team at risk. It wasn’t a responsible thing to do. I also realised you cannot cut a person’s hair properly if they're wearing a protective mask – you can’t see what they look like. To continue working would have required a huge compromise, and why would I do that?”
This rethink culminated in Hartley selling his 1960s Modernist home near London and moving back to his home county. The house he chose for its peace and privacy is among open fields, with views for miles. In true Hartley style, however, a shift to rural Northern life did not mean he was going to do it traditionally.
Once again disrupting convention, he had his sitting room, library and atrium painted from ceiling to skirting board in dense navy blue and charcoal, creating a dramatic surface for the modern furniture and artworks he would showcase. “Bringing everything here required a lot of curation and it's a continuous process of editing.”
He has lately acquired decorative pieces for both the house and its garden – rare 20th-century lamps from Europe, vintage signs, plaster busts, a trio of Bauhaus-inspired birdboxes and a pair of oversized zinc finials – through local antique shops, salvage dealers and art studios.
“I’ve also got my library, and I couldn’t part with that,” he says of the hundreds of art, design and cultural history books amassed over many years. These now live in floor-toceiling custom-built oak shelving. “One of the first books I owned, and still have, came from Edwin Storey’s shop on Micklegate in York, right by where I lived as a kid. I’m a maniac for books. A famous figure in the fashion industry has asked me more than once if I'll leave them my library when I die.”
The house itself is both old and new.
The glass atrium built on one side of the