Touring the WOW!house 2023: Part 2

In June the WOW!house event is hosted inside the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour in London, celebrating extraordinary interior design. Continuing the tour, you can find Part 1. of the Wow!house design tour we featured a couple of weeks ago here, let’s take a look inside the remaining rooms of this unique design event.

‘3am Room’!

Designed by Maddux Creative in collaboration with Fromental, the ‘3am Room’! of floating platforms and geometric structures exudes a vibrant energy that encourages free-spirited exploration and inspiring conversations. “We have created a set,” say Maddux Creative’s founders Scott Maddux and Jo Le Gleud. “It is an experimental space created to trigger the imagination.”

Given free access to Fromental’s extraordinary archive Maddux and Le Gleud were, they say, “like children in a sweet shop”. Taking the delicious treasures they found there as a starting point, they collaborated with Fromental to produce brand new textures, fabrics, patterns and effects specifically for this space. Highlights include the glorious fabrics ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Agatized’ and the wall panels, some of which feature steel-effect paper and others intriguing mosaic designs which have been printed on silk linen faille then over-painted and embroidered.

Day Room

From Courtyard we continue our journey into the next room where reflective surfaces give way to a rich, seductive palette of bronze and parchment, straw and gold, silk and shagreen, stone and mohair. Created by Timothy Mather, founder of Timothy Mather Design, this is a day room reimagined as an exotic and sensual ‘transcendental lounge’. “My initial inspiration was Paris in the 1920s – the Jazz Age, tribal art, art deco – and my muse was the fabulous Josephine Baker,” Mather says.

The space is a collaboration between Mather and the room sponsors, British designer Alexander Lamont, Lamont’s London showroom partner Miles de Lange, and textile specialists Lauren Hwang New York. Alexander Lamont is known for its refined, handcrafted collections of furniture, lighting, objects and wall panels in unexpected, natural materials.

House of Rohl Bathroom

The lights are low and above you a ceiling fan slowly turns. You have stepped into an exotic sanctuary dedicated to the art of bathing. At first glance, this WOW!house bathroom, created by London design company Studio Mica in collaboration with room sponsor House of Rohl, reads as a single space, its soothing simplicity a result of the single tonal colour palette of natural materials.

Pause a moment, however, and you realise that the room is composed of three distinct areas, each with a defined sybaritic function. There is a place to bathe. Private and intimate, Victoria + Albert‘s free-standing ‘Vetralla 1650’ bath is framed by a raised floor and lowered ceiling. There is a place for massage, stretched out on a long stone plinth backdropped by a semi-translucent illuminated screen and, when you pass beneath the beam, there is a place for showering. The walls here are lined with La Pietra Compattata’s decorative, upcycled clay bricks suggestive of an outside space, while spa jets mounted either side of the twin showers provide a 360-degree spa experience.

Gosling Library

Tapestries warm the walls, a vast antique Baccarat chandelier hangs from the ceiling and an elaborate marble fireplace with an inset brass grate promises warmth, inviting you to settle down in one of the chairs Gosling custom designed and upholstered in a Rubelli fabric.

“This is the actual library I have been working on for a 57-room chateau my fiancé Steve and I bought in France as a personal project,” says furniture and interior designer Tim Gosling. “The concept was to create a perfect cubed room based on the Palace of Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors.”

Gosling has captured that regal brilliance in the two huge mirrors that sit atop a pair of antique corner bookcases (bookcases he has mirrored with bespoke iterations in the opposing corners to give a sense of palatial symmetry), and a pair of display plinths inset with LED jewellery lighting created by Lalique to Gosling’s design.

Study

From a winter library to a light-filled study conceived as an artist’s studio where inside and outside merge. “The starting point for this room was really drilling down into what a study is, which is a place of calm to explore and develop an individual’s understanding and skills in any given field,” says the scheme’s creator, British interior designer Clare Gaskin. “Collectively, at Clare Gaskin Interiors we all share a passion for, and background in, art so I felt turning this space into an artist’s studio was the most natural direction to take. And I was excited by the challenge of making a room for a client who doesn’t exist.”

The client she has imagined is well-travelled, a lover of fine craftsmanship and nature and a maker of art for its own sake. They are looking for a room filled with light, that feels authentic and personal and which creates a sense of improved wellbeing.

De Le Cuona Bedroom

Christian Bense’s WOW!house bedroom for luxury, natural fabric specialists de Le Cuona juxtaposes traditional English architecture with the colours and textures of Africa. The unusual, utterly beguiling result is, Bense says, best described as “the love child of a safari tent and a Bloomsbury apartment,” appealing to “our sense of wanderlust, opening our eyes to the beauty of artisanship, sustainable materials, natural textures and the embrace of colour.” Shades lean to the rich and warm – earth tones, veldt green and burnt orange accented by soft, sophisticated neutrals.

The Georgian-style wall cladding and cornicing acts as an elegant framework for pieces of statement furniture such as the Victorian faux bamboo sleigh bed, beautiful, brutalist-meets-Africa desk by The Galvin Brothers and Robert Langford’s one-off sofa. But the real stars of the show are room sponsor de Le Cuona’s fabrics. “The fact that one can quite literally design an entire space using a single fabric house really should be acknowledged and celebrated,” Bense says.

Dining Room

As well as its reputation for creating award-winning residential and hospitality interiors, Martin Hulbert Design is also known for its convivial Friday lunch club. These informal afternoons are the inspiration for the studio’s WOW!house Dining Room. “The space truly represents the look and feel we personally love and somewhere we would want to live ourselves,” says co-founder Martin Hulbert.

This is a dining room made for people and feasting. The bespoke square table in the centre of the room seats 16, and can also be divided to make space for an additional eight. The dining chairs these guests will sit in combine elegance with comfort (they have arms!) and the practicality of loose slip covers. And, since the designer-hosts are expecting lots of laughter, they have upholstered the walls in sound absorbing fabric.

Home Bar

This glamorous Home Bar, conceived by Tala Fustok Studio, is a bold, intergalactic oasis for a sumptuous WOW!house breakfast. Morning is moonlit in this space, an illusion Fustok has conjured with textiles, furniture and lighting. A hedonistic, backlit fabric ceiling tapers down towards a bespoke art deco cabinet boasting a unique, blue moonscape finish and an interior gilded with glomis glass. The floor is covered with a carpet from Tim Page Carpets decorated with a custom-made pattern inspired by aurora borealis, Saturn and shooting stars.

Two PSLab wall lamps made from reeded blown glass sit on the gloss walls, creating a starburst effect. And in the centre of this lunar landscape is a breakfast bar crafted from black pitted limestone by Officina Coppola’s creative director, Donato Coppola. Lit by a statement pendant from Vaughan, it is covered with a constellation of objects made by a host of brilliant British artisans. Decadent cake stands mix with extravagant glass pieces and ceramic flights of fancy such as English artist Alma Berrow’s ceramic breakfast platter in a curation that is out of this world.

Martin Moore Kitchen

Kitchens are the heart of every home and, since this home is the WOW!house, that heart has a glorious, glamorous beat. Interior designer Henry Prideaux’s starting point was room sponsor Martin Moore’s ‘New Deco’ kitchen.

Inspired by the architects and craftsmen of the 1930s, the custom-built, handcrafted cabinetry and freestanding pieces have “great shape” says Prideaux and are formed from natural materials including marble, limestone and porcelain.

Against this timeless framework, Prideaux has added layer upon layer of decorative detail and a colour palette of playful pinks. The cabinetry is embellished with ornate plasterwork and panelling; Ben Whistler’s bar chairs are upholstered in a sumptuous velvet from luxury fabric house Dedar, while three extravagant ‘Sorrento’ chandeliers from Pure White Lines hang from the ceiling, which is papered in Altfield’s fabulously decadent gold moir. “I think the person that’s going to use this room is someone who wants to have a lot of fun, but is a serious cook as well,” Prideaux says. “It’s an amazing kitchen, but it’s a bit of a party room too.”

 

Summer Terrace

Coastal glamour meets regency Hollywood of the 1950s and 1960s in this outdoor terrace by Studio Winch for room sponsor Summit Furniture. Inspired by both the glamorous ocean front home of American socialite Babe Paley and Slim Aarons’ bold, colour-filled photographs of pool scenes and beaches, Studio Winch, led by senior partner and head of interiors Selina McCabe, has imagined an elegant beach front retreat that evokes a sense of serene sophistication and coastal relaxation.

The playful geometry so characteristic of Aaronsʼ images is echoed in the furniture that fills this terrace. There is Arc, the collection Studio Winch designed for Summit Furniture in 2019 whose sculptural shapes and elegant weave bring to mind the long arcing lines of latitude and longitude, the curve of the horizon, and a full sail. And, making its debut at WOW!house, there is Summit Furniture’s Paley range with its scalloped forms and side tables envisioned as stand-alone sculptures.

 

 

All photography by James McDonald

For more information, please click through to the mentioned designers and brands.

Visit Design Centre Chelsea Harbour for more details and upcoming event schedule.