Previous Left: Mayfair’s Burlington Gate apartment. Previous Right: The Colyer, Covent garden apartment. Left: Robertson Small Hotel near Cape Town, South Africa. Below Left: Bedroom at Mayfair’s Burlington Gate apartment.
she responds in a refreshingly candid manner. “I have an extraordinary team. Pretty early on I decided to hire people who are older and better than me and that proved to be a game changer. To this day I have three or four people who have been with me almost from the beginning and without them it just would not have been possible to have achieved so much in such a short time. Their experience, confidence and skills were especially valuable in the early days when my youth and inexperience may have been questioned. “Our projects are split equally between London and the countryside. I am a country bumkin at heart so I really enjoy projects which get me out, it changes the process and you instinctively create something totally different. We do still take on projects that fall into the passion category where we hardly earn a bean, but we just love it. Obviously, I am running a business with no other shareholders, I don’t have investment and I have 14 members of staff, so the decisions I make these days have to be commercial. But if someone pulls at my heart strings or makes me get very excited and we can do something extraordinary together and it would be fun, then I’m a pretty easy target! In this very difficult and uncertain financial climate it is reassuring that we are starting to receive international commissions, naturally where they are the additional homes of existing clients.” As she laughingly says, “when I started my business there were times when I doubted what I was doing. I can’t possibly have known what I was doing. I was 25 years old, lacked the requisite experience in both practical and financial terms. So, everything we have achieved has come from trusting my gut instinct for things and being quite ballsy about asking other people in the industry for advice. “Someone like Bernd Radaschitz of INTERIORiD, for example, is the perfect person for me to turn to when I am uncertain about anything. When I first met him, Studio Ashby was still in the embryonic stages, and much as I liked him and their product, I was slightly 09
intimidated by the consummate level of their joinery and the immense level of projects they were working on. I knew we were not ready and our clientele would not be able to afford him. “Fortunately, before too long we started to get the kind of projects where we could work together. A commercial trip to Milan where we had dinner with Bernd and his brother, Johann, and really enjoyed their company was a decisive moment. When we were selected as the interior designers for a vast family house in Kensington, we asked INTERIOR-iD to pitch for the joinery contract for the entire house, including the vast kitchen. Although the financial aspect is one of the crucial decisions, it is imperative to have a close, reliable and amicable relationship with a joinery company, and Bernd is recognised as almost peerless in both respects. We repeated the experience on a sumptuous apartment in Burlington Gate, with equal success.” When asked why they are so unique in their field, her response is brutally honest. “It’s a combination of their Austrian heritage, the ethos that is inherent in a fourth-generation family business, the pervading philosophy of reverence for time-honoured skills, combined with modern technical efficiency. Their showroom in Notting Hill is a haven for us and for clients, and their sampling process in Austria is almost unrivalled. Most importantly, they create exactly what was promised, and deliver on time. They run a really tight ship and so do I. It makes working together so much easier. We are remarkably similar in the way we do business. “Looking ahead I would hope that Studio Ashby is simply a superior version of what it is now. I don’t want it to be bigger and I have no desire to have 60-100 members of staff. That’s not why I’m doing this. We are lucky that we are able to choose only to work with delightful clients. I haven’t worked on a project yet of which I’m not superbly proud. I want to always enjoy the creative design process because I love what I do”.