House Fancy Magazine | Issue 1

HOUSE FANCY

Editor’s Note

Hello, and welcome to the first issue of House Fancy. I am delighted you decided to pick up a copy of this magazine. Whether you are a designer, homebuilder, or admirer of fancy homes, I hope you will gain as much inpiration as I did curating this magazine. With three articles depicting gourgeous homes and hot tips, every page is a treat.

It was eye opening and an amazing experience interviewing some of the top designers around the world in this issue. We could not do what we do without you our readers so may I offer everyone at House Fancy’s sincere appreciation for your support of this magazine. Until next time... stay fancy.

XoxoMary

EDITOR’S LETTER

HOW MANY BOOKS DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE A PLACE LIKE HOME?

There’s a reason that some people won’t let go of their physical books — and a new term for it: ‘book-wrapt.’ At the turn of the millennium, Reid Byers, a computer systems architect, set out to build a private library at his home in Princeton, N.J. Finding few books on library architecture that were not centuries old and in a dead or mildewed language, he took the advice of a neighbor across the street, the novelist Toni Morrison.

HOW THE EXPERTS SHOP EUROPE’S FINEST ANTIQUE MARKETS

by Melissa Studach

When traced back to its French origins, the word souvenir translates to “memory,” explained Toma Clark Haines, CEO of The Antiques Diva Co., at the recent panel “European Treasures, Discovered.” “I love it, because that’s what you actually do when you’re buying antiques overseas. You’re buying memories,” said Haines at the Designer Forum Series event, a new initiative presented by the D&D Building.

ENTER THE WHIMSICAL WORLD OF INTERIOR DESIGNER KIT KEMP

by Julie Lasky by F&P Interiors

Kit Kemp has forged herself as an internationally acclaimed design icon with her transformative interiors having firmly established themselves as a design style in their own right. Celebrated for her captivating living spaces whose colourful fabrics, eclectic home accessories and exciting artwork invite guests on a joyful journey of discovery. Join us on our voyage into the whimsical world of Kit Kemp design to learn how to achieve her look in your own home.

How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home?

THERE’S A REASON THAT SOME PEOPLE WON’T LET GO OF THEIR PHYSICAL BOOKS—AND A NEW TERM FOR IT: ‘BOOK-WRAPT.’ AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, REID BYERS, A COMPUTER SYSTEMS ARCHITECT, SET OUT TO BUILD A PRIVATE LIBRARY AT HIS HOME IN PRINCETON, N.J. FINDING FEW BOOKS ON LIBRARY ARCHITECTURE THAT WERE NOT CENTURIES OLD AND IN A DEAD OR MILDEWED LANGUAGE, HE TOOK THE ADVICE OF A NEIGHBOR ACROSS THE STREET, THE NOVELIST TONI MORRISON.

WRITTEN BY JULIE LASKY PHTOTOGRAPHY BY MARY FOWLES

Ms. Morrison “once famously said if there is a book you want to read and it doesn’t exist, then you must write it,” recalled Mr. Byers, 74, in a video chat from his current home, in Portland, Maine.

The project stretched over a generation and culminated this year in a profusely illustrated, detail-crammed, Latin-strewn and yet remarkably unstuffy book called “The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom,” published by Oak Knoll Press.

The opus arrives at an ambivalent time for book owners. As the pandemic’s social and economic disruptions have nudged people into new homes, some are questioning whether it is worth dragging along their collections. Given the inflated costs of real estate and the capacity of e-readers to hold thousands of titles, maybe that precious floor and wall space could be put to other uses?

Lisa Jacobs, the founder and chief executive of Imagine It Done, a home organization service in New York City, said that out of hundreds of projects in the past few years, she can recall only three requests to organize books. In one of those examples, the arranged books were treated as a backdrop—to be admired, but not read. “The clientele that has collected books through the years are not as numerous for us,” she said.

And yet there are clear benefits in a pandemic to having a private sanctuary programmed for escapism.

“The tactile connection to books and the need for places of refuge in the home, both for work and for personal well-being, have made libraries a renewed focus in residential design,” said Andrew Cogar, the president of Historical Concepts, an architecture firm with offices in Atlanta and New York.

Morgan Munsey, who sells real estate for Compass in Brooklyn and Manhattan, has seen well-groomed libraries in brownstones help spark bidding wars. “Even when I stage a house, I put books in them,” he said.

In “The Private Library,” Mr. Byers goes to the heart of why physical books continue to beguile us. Individually, they are frequently useful or delightful, but it is when books are displayed en masse that they really work wonders. Covering the walls of a room, piled up to the ceiling and exuding the breath of generations, they nourish the senses, slay boredom and relieve distress.

“Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend,” he writes. “It is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center.”

Mr. Byers coined a term—“book-wrapt”—to describe the exhilarating comfort of a well-stocked library. The fusty spelling is no affectation, but an efficient packing of meaning into a tight space (which, when you think of it, also describes many libraries). To be surrounded by books is to be held rapt in an enchanted circle and to experience the rapture of being transported to other worlds.

So how many books does it take to feel book-wrapt? Mr. Byers cited a common belief that 1,000 is the minimum in any self-respecting home library. Then he quickly divided that number in half. Five hundred books ensure that a room “will begin to feel like a library,” he said. And even that number is negotiable. The library he kept at the end of his bunk on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, he said, was “very highly valued, though it probably didn’t have 30 books in it.”

“What’s five times 40?” Alice Waters, the chef and food activist, recently asked. (The question was rhetorical.) “Two hundred, 400, 600, 800,” she calculated, apparently scanning the bookcases around her and adding up their contents (she was speaking on the phone). “And then probably another 800,” she said, referring to other rooms in her Berkeley, Calif., bungalow.

Yes, Ms. Waters, 77, who opened a new restaurant in Los Angeles called Lulu last month, is officially book-wrapt. She owns hundreds of cookbooks organized by cuisine, as well as volumes on farming, nutrition, education, environmental calamity, victory gardens, chef memoirs, French gastronomic terminology, art, architecture, design and fiction. The author of more than a dozen of her own books, she recently published “We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto,” written with Bob Carrau and Cristina Mueller.

“Libraries always refer to earlier libraries,” Mr. Byers said.

Taking inventory in the room where she works (she added three of the custom bookcases last year), Ms. Waters verbally enacted the capricious browsing habits of a book lover on the loose, for whom all authors are alive, even when they are not. Her references skipped from the journalist Michael Pollan to the graphic and product designer Tibor Kalman to the environmentalist poet and novelist Wendell Berry to Patti Smith. (Ms. Waters bought 25 copies of the rock star’s memoir, “Just Kids,” to give away as Christmas gifts.)

Having begun 4,000 years ago, as “strange little rooms in modest Mesopotamian houses” storing cuneiform tablets, libraries reached their Western European apotheosis by the 18th and 19th centuries as grand paneled spaces with fireplaces, ornate ceilings, built-in shelves, hard and soft chairs (for serious and relaxed reading), plush carpets, game tables, maybe a grand piano and secret doors (through which servants discreetly entered to tend fires).

“Libraries always refer to earlier libraries,” Mr. Byers said. Influencers include the 45-foot-long Italian Renaissance room with a barrel vault built in the mid-15th century by Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and, to a lesser extent, the bookcase-lined refuge of the British diarist Samuel Pepys, who died in 1703. Asked to describe what the library of the future might look like, Mr. Byers flashed a photo of a room at Highclere Castle in England, the setting of the television series “Downton Abbey.”

She uses a library ladder—her shelves rise that high. “But I’m not a reader; I’m a film person,” she said. “I like to be able to pull out a book and read a passage and be inspired.”

Reader or not, Ms. Waters’s sparrow-like style of dipping and hopping is one of the great joys of library ownership, in Mr. Byers’s view. “The ability to browse among your books generates something completely new,” he said. “I like to think of it as a guaranteed cure for boredom.”

Alexandre Assouline’s loft in the NoLIta neighborhood in Manhattan is not technically book-wrapt, yet Mr. Byers would almost surely cut him slack. Chief of operations, brand and strategy at Assouline, the publishing company founded by his parents, Prosper and Martine Assouline, he recently designed a library of 400 books that fills a wall of the unit, clear to the 15-foot ceiling.

“Every day when I wake up, this is the first thing I see,” Mr. Assouline, 29, said of his collection, which is dominated by glamorous coffee-table books—the company’s specialty—and is visible from most spots in the one-bedroom apartment. Because he leases the unit, he had to erect the solid walnut shelves without drilling into the wall; they are supported by posts compressed between the floor and ceiling.

Mr. Assouline designs private libraries for other people, too, and said he treats each as a mirror of the owner’s personality, giving weight to both books and objects. Gazing into Mr. Assouline’s own reflected depths, one finds whimsical Italian porcelain monkeys and rare antique brass lions, a miniature statue group of the Three Graces and an ailing juniper bonsai tree that raised a sigh from him when its condition was pointed out. (He acknowledged that it really should not be indoors.)

“I want it to be alive,” he said of his display, meaning not just organic but changeable. “To me, a library is never done.”

It is easy to fall into a semantic swamp figuring out exactly where a jumble of books ends and a library begins, but we have clear ideas of what a room designated as a library should look like. You can thank the English country house for that, Mr. Byers said.

Indeed, private libraries hew so closely to convention that it is often hard to say at a glance when any particular one was completed — even roughly. (In this way, libraries are the opposite of kitchens, which a practiced eye can date to within half a decade.)

“It is often a woody room, or a room that has a deeper color sometimes, if painted,” said Gil Schafer III, a New York architect, of the libraries he routinely incorporates into residential projects. (However, when Mr. Schafer added a small library to his own retreat in Maine several years ago, he covered the walls in sheets of oak plywood rather than traditional paneling, to create an effect that was “beautiful but not fancy.”)

Even a postmodern sensation like the inventor and entrepreneur Jay S. Walker’s library, built in 2002 in Ridgefield, Conn.—which is dedicated to the history of human imagination and laid out like an M.C. Escher labyrinth, with books stacked 26 shelves high—makes clear references to antecedents, Mr. Byers points out in his book. “The recessed and paneled wall frames might have come from Kedleston,” an English country estate in Derbyshire, designed in 1759 by Robert Adam. And “the barrel vault over the library distinctly recalls Stourhead,” an 18th-century Palladian house in the English county of Wiltshire, he noted.

Which is not to say that if you build a library, it will be used as one. Roger Seifter, a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, in New York City, typically designs houses that contain a main-floor room with bookshelves, which he described as “a more intimate type of living room.” The space is labeled a library on the plans, but might morph into a den, study, media room or—especially now—

It is easy to fall into a semantic swamp figuring out exactly where a jumble of books ends and a library begins, but we have clear ideas of what a room designated as a library should look like.

“You can thank the English country house for that,” Mr. Byers said.

“The tactile connection to books and the need for places of refuge in the home, both for work and for personal well-being, have made libraries a renewed focus in residential design”

home office. (Definitions quickly get murky, but architects seem to agree that libraries are rooms buffered as much as possible from noise and traffic, and thus are naturally suited as work spaces.)

Conversely, rooms intended for non-bookish purposes are finding new lives as libraries. Mr. Schafer was not a maverick when he chose to put a sofa, bookcases and a television at one end of a dining room in one of his projects. “Dining rooms can be deadly rooms where there’s a table and chairs and no other use,” he said.

“Any large room looks wrong without the appropriate number of people in it,” Mr. Byers writes. “An unused living room looks empty. An empty ballroom is absolutely creepy; it looks as if it is waiting desperately for something to happen. A library, on the other hand, is delightful when full but still especially attractive when empty.”

And masses of books, he said, represent “delights that we hold in possibility”—the joy of being able to lift a hand and tap unexplored worlds. (Because who among us has read every single book in our libraries?) “I like to be in a room where I’ve read half the books, and I’d like there to be enough books that I cannot possibly read them in my remaining years,” he said.

Still, one can dream of completion, as Mr. Byers, who was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, apparently did when he inscribed this verse inside volumes from his own collection:

This book belongs to the Rev. Reid Byers, Who still hopes to read it Before he expires.

the other hand, is delightful when full but still especially attractive when empty.”

“Any large room looks wrong without the appropriate number of people in it,” Mr. Byers writes. “An unused living room looks empty. An empty ballroom is absolutely creepy; it looks as if it is waiting desperately for something to happen. A library, on

Photography by Mary Fowles

How the Experts Shop Europe’s Finest Antique Markets

WHEN TRACED BACK TO ITS FRENCH ORIGINS, THE WORD SOUVENIR TRANSLATES TO “MEMORY,” EXPLAINED TOMA CLARK HAINES, CEO OF THE ANTIQUES DIVA CO., AT THE RECENT PANEL “EUROPEAN TREASURES, DISCOVERED.” “I LOVE IT, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO WHEN YOU’RE BUYING ANTIQUES OVERSEAS. YOU’RE BUYING MEMORIES,” SAID HAINES AT THE DESIGNER FORUM SERIES EVENT, A NEW INITIATIVE PRESENTED BY THE D&D BUILDING.

WRITTEN BY MELISSA STUDACH

The self-described Antiques Diva, whose antiques tour company celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, was joined by designers Garrow Kedigian and Robert Passal to share their expert tips for shopping the European antique markets. Take notes as EAL reveals their best-kept secrets for sourcing with a client, negotiating the best deal and transporting your finds back to the U.S.

ON SHOPPING FOR (OR WITH) A CLIENT

GARROW KEDIGIAN: I have skeptical clients who think, “Oh, we’re not going to find anything in Paris. Paris is so fancy.” So I always take my clients shopping in New York before we go to Paris. I specifically take them to showrooms that we love, knowing we can present them with similar pieces in Paris at a fraction of the cost. It helps in the negotiation factor.

ROBERT PASSAL: It’s important to pre-shop. Whether I’m at an antique market or I have a client in town, I always pre-shop, because that’s what we’re being hired for is to edit.

GK: I’ll send [a photo] and say, “These pieces are perfect for these locations. You send them a furniture plan and tell them that by the end of the day on Saturday, you need to email me back wand say yes or no.” I find that a lot of indecisive clients will actually make a decision.

ON THE BEST TIME TO GO

TOMA CLARK HAINES: When not to go is probably more important. In the month of May, there are three Catholic holidays, which means there are three weekends of the month that the country closes down. July 15 to around August 15 is difficult, because there are less vendors.

GK: I always have the best success in September. And I usually push clients to go shopping early on in a project. We always work out our furniture plans early because it will take a few months to [ship] stuff over.

ON THE BEST MARKETS TO SHOP

TCH: If you’re only going to shop one place, I’d say shop in England. For hundreds of years, the Brits have been collectors, and you can go to one place and find the best of everything in one location.

ON NEGOTIATING A DEAL

TCH: Each country has different negotiating tactics and techniques. It’s knowing what makes the vendor in that specific location tick. In Italy, you have to build a rapport with the vendor before negotiating. In the Netherlands, the Dutch do not like to give discounts. Knowing the local mentality is probably the most important thing you can do to get the best price.

I also give my client a safe word, because sometimes the client is so excited that I think, “Oh, my god, they’re going to pay twice what they need to pay because I know that three days [ago] they had it priced at something else. Sometimes you need your client to keep quiet so you can negotiate.”

RP: I think the clients like when they think you’re doing the best you can for them when you negotiate for them in front of them. It depends on the client, but I like the transparency.

ON WHAT TO EXPECT FOR SHIPPING ESTIMATES

TCH: Be prepared that it’s going to take a long time. Your shippers are probably going to say you’ll have it in a month, and in theory, that’s true, because it’s 25 days at sea. However, what that doesn’t account for is how long it takes for your money to get to the vendor, then your shipper to collect it from the vendor and then to wrap it in their warehouse, so I always tell clients: Expect two months, be prepared for three months.

The fact is, they can’t estimate shipping before you’ve bought. If you’re going in blind and just buying a few items, you’ve got to be aware that the shipping is not going to be cheap. Where you save money: Go big or go home is always my theory. Buy a container. A full container can cost you about $15,000, so if you’re buying 40 to 50 pieces, suddenly that container cost is negligible. That’s when you save money.

Another place is your collection points. If you’re at the Paris flea market, it’s nice because it’s all in one place, but many of our clients are doing multiple countries in three to five days. At every store, there’s a fee for someone going and picking it up. When you buy something from one vendor, maybe rather than negotiating a discount, you say, “Will you bring it over to this vendor that’s an hour away so that I only have to pay one collection fee?” And honestly, I think crate costs is where shippers rip people off. Each crate runs about $350. You have to decide what your comfort level is for risk. Are you will to have something happen to that item?

GK: It’s true. I recently bought this very cool tandem bicycle, but it really doesn’t have an intrinsic value. It’s just a cool object. The clients came back to me and said, “We’re going to wrap it in a crate,” and I said, “No, no, no.” We wrapped it in some paper, and that decreased the cost by 50 percent on shipping.

ON BEST-KEPT SECRETS

TCH: When you go to the antique shows, tell the dealer, “I love what you have, but you don’t have what I’m looking for. What do you have at home?” That’s what I ask every antique dealer. If I ever go missing, it’s because I’m a person who follows people down dark alleys in pursuit of antiques! 09.

Enter the Whimsical World of Interior Designer Kit Kemp

KIT KEMP HAS FORGED HERSELF AS AN INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED DESIGN ICON WITH HER TRANSFORMATIVE INTERIORS HAVING FIRMLY ESTABLISHED THEMSELVES AS A DESIGN STYLE IN THEIR OWN RIGHT. CELEBRATED FOR HER CAPTIVATING LIVING SPACES WHOSE COLOURFUL FABRICS, ECLECTIC HOME ACCESSORIES AND EXCITING ARTWORK INVITE GUESTS ON A JOYFUL JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY. JOIN US ON OUR VOYAGE INTO THE WHIMSICAL WORLD OF KIT KEMP DESIGN TO LEARN HOW TO ACHIEVE HER LOOK IN YOUR OWN HOME.

WRITTEN BY F&P INTERIORS PHOTOGRAPHY BY KIT KEMP & MARY FOWLES

Interior designer Kit Kemp has been developing inspiring, vibrant interiors for almost three decades. With a background in graphic design, this self taught creative is one half of the husband and wife duo that co-founded the Firmdale Hotels group.

A collection of boutique hotels in London and New York, Kit Kemp is the creative force behind their award winning interiors. With each enjoying its own distinctive style that celebrates the properties unique features and quirky characters, rooms are transformed into fresh, modern spaces that are equally as beautiful as they are comfortable.

Her quintessential British style has led her to collaborate with big names including Andrew Martin and Christopher Farr to create her very own beautiful range of fabrics and wallpapers. Her passion for home-grown talent and celebration of quality craftsmanship has seen her become a global influencer and proud ambassador of British design.

ACHIEVING THAT KIT KEMP STYLE

The Kit Kemp look has taken the design world by storm with her trademark technicolor living spaces seeing the most unlikely combinations placed alongside each other as she blurs and blends traditional interior styles. Although they are each as unique as the next, underneath the kaleidoscope of pattern and colour there are guidelines that govern her signature style. Follow these simple design tips to create your very own Kit Kemp inspired living space.

ROOM LAYOUT & FURNISHINGS

The success to Kit Kemp’s style is that sense of equilibrium one feels as they enter a room. Spaces feel balanced, calm and stable. This can be realized by the clever placement of your furniture. Start by defining the different areas within a room to give you a better idea of the space you have to work with. Your central point, often a sofa or bed, should be the largest item of furniture around which other small items are placed.

You will notice that Kit Kemp often uses side tables and occasional chairs to define the boundary of an area, sometimes forming a sub-section within the room. A fine example of this can be seen in her collaboration with Andrew Martin featuring Cavalat stripe fabric. By placing the same item of furniture on both sides of the room, she creates a visual mirror that results in the room looking well proportioned and pleasing to the eye.

MIXING DESIGNS & PATTERNS

The multi coloured assortment of tones and patterns that feature within Kit Kemp’s schemes push the boundaries of traditional design. She favours an eclectic mix that sees geometric fabric, floral fabric, colourful plain fabric and abstract prints jar alongside each other in perfect harmony.

Begin by sampling an array of different designs, colours and pattern sizes to see what they look like together. Kit Kemp is clever in her choice of fabrics as she selects designs that enhance the features of a room. Keep in mind the spaces that they are set to occupy, for example a large print curtain fabric can increase the height of your windows as the pattern cascades from floor to ceiling. On the other hand, patterns with a smaller design can make cushions look plumper as the compact scale makes the surface appear fuller.

If you are struggling with where to begin, start by looking to a piece of artwork or embroidered fabric that will feature in your room. By using their colours to inform your palette, you can build a scheme that combines a medley of fabrics that will relate to one another through the artwork.

KIT KEMP HEADBOARDS

Her iconic statement headboards has become synonymous with Kit Kemp bedrooms. This larger than life example at the Ham Yard Hotel draws your eye to the centre of a room with the vibrant Carousel fabric contrasting beautifully against the blue textured wallpaper.

The jarring combination of a bold geometric upholstery fabric and a modern floral curtain fabric works so beautifully together because they share the same colours and pattern size. The rest of the scheme is kept relatively neutral to allow these commanding colours to pop against the calmer white canvas that surrounds them.

OCCASIONAL CHAIRS

A fan of fabulous prints and patterns, Kit Kemp’s creativity really comes into its own when challenged with finding a way to feature a favourite fabric within a room. Her trademark upholstered armchairs are often seen sporting two or sometimes three different fabrics, upgrading these chairs from a piece of furniture into a work of art.

The perfect opportunity to use delicate weaves or embroidered fabrics that are less suitable for high trafficked areas, these cloths can be featured on areas of chair where they are protected from wear and tear.

WALLPAPER YOUR WALLS

Kit Kemp rooms are often wallpapered rather than painted to achieve that smart and tailored finish. A perfect opportunity

to add further colour and texture to a space, her artistic wall features make sure that the walls are not forgotten within the overall design.

Her collaboration with artist Melissa White on her illustrious hand-painted murals showcase how walls can become the focal point of a space. By opting for softer, more neutral fabrics across furnishings it will allow the artistry to command the room. As wall murals can be printed to a bespoke size they are also a flexible option for spaces that have an unusual layout as they provide continuity across the walls.

Another design trick that we have seen in Kit Kemp interiors time and time again is using paper backed fabric on the walls to create a luxurious effect unlike any other wall treatment. The stunning geometric fabric by Jim Thompson is featured on both the curtains and the walls as a matching design which flawlessly ties the room together in both pattern and colour.

If you are looking for something to create a calmer, more airy atmosphere then wallpapers with a subtle textural finish are ideal to achieve that polished look. This Chambray Linen Wallpaper provides that flush appearance of a plain wallpaper whilst adding tactile interest to the surface. By continuing these subtle textures across the upholstery and curtains within the room, it binds the overall scheme with a sophisticated and stylish finish.

If you are struggling with where to begin, start by looking to a piece of artwork or embroidered fabric that will feature in your room. By using their colours to inform your palette, you can build a scheme that combines a medley of fabrics that will relate to one another through the artwork.

THE FINISH

The finishing touches and eccentric accessories are what makes Kit Kemp interiors so enchanting to the eye. Each piece is personal to the room, creating interesting spaces that invite you to explore. Items reveal places that have been travelled to and books that have been enjoyed, adding a sense of familiarity that makes her rooms feel homely.

Kit Kemp designs rooms to be both stylish and functional and her choice in lighting is a fine example of how she achieves this. Table lamps provide a practical source of light whilst doubling as pieces of sculpture. Their unique shapes and various materials add textures and colour to the room.

Vibrant artwork is a dominant feature within Kit Kemp interiors and is purposefully hung in an area that can be admired from all areas the room. Whilst being a beautiful addition to the walls, it often shares its colour palette with the rest of the room and helps to links the overall scheme together.

Whilst not all finishing touches are quite as prominent, they still play a huge role in achieving that polished Kit Kemp look. Look closely and you will notice that upholstery and cushions are adorned with trimmings to give neat edges and a tailored finish.

A great excuse to add extra splashed of colour, we often see Kit Kemp choosing contrasting tones that appear across other areas of the room. This helps to work stand-alone pieces into a scheme whilst maintaining their individuality.

THE DESIGNERS

A proud ambassador of home-grown talent, Kit Kemp showcases the best of British designers. Respected for their industry knowledge and commitment to quality materials, these brands share her passion for beautiful fabrics and wallpapers.

Their individual styles and unique colour palettes means that each brand brings its own look to the table. This treasure trove of luxury materials and creative patterns are all you need to create that signature Kit Kemp look at home....

Photography by Mary Fowles