When do you know when to ask for help? Much as I like to do everything myself, I can’t. Well I could, but would I live to tell it is the thing. In my years as a life coach I never cease to wonder at how often asking for help is the road less taken. I mean come on people. What are we trying to prove here? That we can exhaust ourselves so there is nothing of us left to give to others, or to the world for that matter, when that is exactly what we want and are meant to do? Of course I’m not just talking about houses. (Are you listening all my Type-A remarkably bright creature friends?!)
But right now I am talking about houses and one in particular, mine in the Cotswolds, aka Lovedays House.
I knew I needed help doing up Lovedays House. Too many moving parts across too many miles and too many resources I just don’t have. Although I toyed with the idea, as one does when one is feeling under-funded and over-confident. “Yes of course you could do it yourself,” advised a smart and stylish friend, “but it will be better with someone else.” She had a point. The point, I reckon. Better, and probably funner.
The search began. The English are spoiled for choice when it comes to talented designers, and I could not have gone wrong with any of the five I met with. All were named in British House & Garden’s Top 101 Designers , and heck, I wanted to work with them all. But when l had tea with Lulu Lytle of Soane Britain, and she mentioned Adam Bray, I had a feeling. And bless him he came to meet me on a Saturday which was the only time I had. He had me at his tatty canvas tote emblazoned: DESECRATOR. Not that design isn’t a serious business, but it is not heart surgery. I wanted this to be fun.
Adam is big fellow with a big personality. His humor is dry and slightly off the wall, and I cannot watch a single of his videos without chuckling. He really should have a TV show. See his reel-ful Instagram here, and the recent video in British H & G is brilliant and funny of him describing his own flat where he says things like, “the whole place is falling to pieces”(sofa needs a bit of work), and “in winter get quite Doctor Zhivago-ish“ (owing to large, drafty 19th century windows), small silver trays as “very ye old-y antique-shop.” The self-deprecation, while also veddy English, is also extra refreshing in our self- and selfie-obsessed social media world.
In that same H & G piece on Adam’s Maida Vale flat, writer Emily Senior is spot-on about Adam’s work, describing it as “a look, counterbalancing the Bohemian and urbane, which could only really have been cultivated in the febrile, cosmopolitan climate of his home city.” Think Georgian table with mid-century French industrial lamp with African textile with English damask with a quirky personal memento or flea market something. Senior continues: “It has earned him a cult following, a list of film people and pop stars as clients, and longstanding collaborations with brands like Soane Britain, Vanderhurd, Plain English and Papers and Paints.” … And little ol’ me.
And here’s more. A client’s London flat …
… and a fab house in Morocco that was published in American Vogue some years ago.
He has a bold color sense and he’s not shy about mixing it up. He also makes space for sentiment, “especially when it comes to family furniture and hideous trinkets.” Let’s hear it for the hideous trinkets.
Adam’s work is outside the box for me in that it is more masculine, more pared down, and inclined to a bolder, earthier palette with not a ruffle in sight. Not that I’m a big ruffle girl, but I do like the occasional prissy pants detail. I thought the tension between our aesthetics would make for a more interesting result.
To see more, and more recent, here’s a gorgeous flat he did that was recently published in World of Interiors.
And meanwhile… here’s a hint of what is to come at Lovedays House…
As one of Adam’s hat’s says: Stay tuned
