Inside a Vibrant Notting Hill Row House Decorated in Record Speed
.jpg)
All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
If a designer has barely a month after signing onto a project to begin finalizing its fixtures, finishes, and fittings, she better hope she finds herself fully dialed into her clients’ aesthetic aspirations from the get-go. Lucky for London’s Tiffany Duggan, of Studio Duggan, that proved just the case with a creative, art-collecting couple whose four-story Victorian row house she recently completed in Notting Hill.
“They’ve got great taste, great style,” says Duggan of the homeowners, parents to three children. What they didn’t have, however, was time to spare: Their new home was well into its top-to-bottom renovation—with the build team, Pembridge Developments, more than ready for final design decisions—when Duggan joined the project. And that’s why it proved a very good thing, indeed: “We were really well aligned from a style perspective and what we both liked,” the designer explains. “That made the process quicker.”
.jpg)
Their simpatico sensibilities extended from a shared love of color to a mutual belief that any interior benefits from a mix of old and new. The clients wanted the decor to feel collected, “very much like it had been growing over time,” the designer continues, explaining this was relatively easy to achieve because the homeowners already had collections of antique and vintage pieces plus extensive art holdings. Perhaps the most important aspect of the alignment between Duggan and her clients? “They wanted to do something fun and interesting,” she says.
So that’s exactly what Duggan did, beginning, of all places, with the children’s bathroom on the top floor, for which she paired zellige tiles in a soft lilac hue with a sink, tub, and toilet from the Water Monopoly, all in a buttery yellow. “We wouldn’t normally start with the bathroom,” Duggan admits, “but since we were tight on time, we focused on things we had to for the build.”
Duggan’s design process ensured that these bold color choices wouldn’t be left high and dry as the rest of the rooms started to flow together. “We always do a look-and-feel mood board for all the key spaces. It really helps, especially when using lots of color and when we have lots of ideas, to lay out a map of how they might all work together,” she explains. And so, when ordering those lilac tiles and yellow bath fixtures, Duggan knew they would complement the vibrant citrine-colored walls of the stair hall, the terra-cotta and sky blue in the adjacent bedrooms of the older children, and the rich reds of the nursery.
.jpg)
Bold gestures balanced by quieter ones emerge throughout this home, beginning with an especially striking start: The foyer greets guests with trompe l’oeil floor-to-ceiling stripes—hand-applied by decorative painter Eugenia Barrios—that turn the perfectly square space into a blue-and-white tented cabana. “These sorts of playful, whimsical details are right up the clients’ alley,” says Duggan.
The mood takes a muted turn—by this house’s standards—in the living room. There, the barely there shade of celadon on the walls provides a quiet counterpoint to a straight-backed sofa from Duggan’s home and lifestyle collection, Trunk, covered in a Pollack Heritage velvet whose saturated color she describes as “Is it red? Is it pink?” Similarly rosy hues define the fireplace fender upholstered in a Schumacher diamond ikat and the contemporary, geometric, cut-pile wool rug from the clients’ own collection.
.jpg)
Throughout the house, “we liked brightness interspersed with something more sludgy,” Duggan continues: that lighter-than-light blue-green of the living room walls, say, or the mossy hue of the dining room’s Studio Ashby mohair curtains, which sit against walls painted a pale but “very uplifting and bright” pink.
Upstairs, in the primary suite, where the greens and pinks continue, the designer says she knew they “wanted to do something quite dramatic for the bed.” She met that desire with a half-tester number crowned and draped with a Lelievre satin stripe and a traditional, country-house-style Bennison fabric that was one of the first textiles the clients selected for the home. Just adjacent, connecting the bedroom to its en-suite pink, mural-wallpapered bath, is a narrow, cabinet-lined dressing area whose artisanal wall decor one would never guess resulted from the project’s short timeline. Duggan commissioned the space’s floor-to-ceiling cupboards almost as soon as she joined the project, knowing a hand-painted decorative finish could be applied later—even though she didn’t quite know what that finish would look like.
When asked how completing a project this quickly makes her feel, Duggan answers honestly, and with a smile, “I feel like I hope we have a little bit longer next time.” Still, she found some solace in the speed: If homeowners have to move quickly, and they’re aligned with the right designer, she says, then maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have a single month instead of many months, or even years, to make decisions. “I was surprised we managed to pull something off this fast,” she concludes, “but we love this project.”
.jpg)
1/9Duggan had the walls, custom cabinetry, and all the millwork in the kitchen done in Paint & Paper Library’s pale jade Reseda hue. The window treatments—in a Jean Monro floral on a jade-and-cream cabana-striped ground—match the roman shades in the dining area, a choice the designer made to connect the two spaces. The sink skirt is a sage-striped Flora Soames textile, the marble is Bianco Fantastico, and the aged-brass sink tap Devol.
.jpg)
2/9The relatively tight footprint of the kitchen led Duggan to place additional cooking space, including the custom-painted pink Aga range, in the dining room. The space centers on the clients’ green-painted contemporary trestle table surrounded by 1960s Rosewood chairs by Niels Otto Møller, all under an Italian midcentury pendant light. Duggan notes that the palette of the Bargello carpet, which she was designing for Trove at the same time she was working on this project, influenced the color scheme of the entire house.
.jpg)
3/9For the floor-through primary suite, on the level above the main living and entertaining rooms, Duggan selected a Trove headboard, which she crowned in half-tester style using fabrics from Bennison (the floral on the outside) and Lelievre (the stripe within). This she flanked with nightstands from Trove topped by Gigi table lamps from Heathfield & Co. The rug is again from Jacaranda Carpets, and the pink wall color is Edward Bulmer’s Cuisse de Nymphe Emue.
.jpg)
4/9Duggan turned to specialist painter Eugenia Barrios—just as she had for the entry—to create the tented striping trompe l’oeil of the hallway-like dressing and storage area that connects the primary bedroom to its ensuite bathroom. She had a coordinating curtain made with a Schumacher fabric and hung playful tassels off the custom cabinetry’s door pulls.
.jpg)
5/9A whimsical, folk art–inspired Andrew Martin mural wallpaper, in this house’s signature pinks and greens, sets the scene in the primary bath. “We did play around with other options,” Duggan says of the paper’s selection. “But that one was something that from the beginning the clients liked.” Over the Cast Iron Bath Company sink the designer hung a pair of 1920s Italian mahogany gold leaf mirrors.
.jpg)
6/9The garden-level guest room pairs a Soane Britain headboard upholstered in a Kalamkari chevron with nightstands and an upholstered bench from the clients’ collection. The lumbar pillow on the bed is from Trove, and the walls are painted in Farrow & Ball’s dusty pink Setting Plaster. The rattan pendant light is by Soho Home.
.jpg)
7/9Duggan says she created the guest bathroom’s checkerboard of deep red and white Mosaic Factory zellige tiles in order to inject some levity into what had been “a sort of dark, gloomy space.” She had the space painted Paint & Paper Library’s Grenache, sourcing the shower curtain fabric once again from Flora Soames, the fixtures from the Cast Iron Bath Company, the sconces from Corston, and the mirror from Trove’s collaboration with Water Monopoly. “It’s now one of my favorite rooms in the house. It feels like you're staying in a cool hotel for the night, which is always nice for guests.”
%2520-%2520rt.jpg)
Art: Tim Braden/Frestonian Gallery, London8/9A Beauvamp pendant light with a ruffled and striped lamp shade provides a sense of play in the nursery, where Paint & Paper Library’s Elizabethan Red swathes the walls. Roman blinds in a delicate botanical from Soane Britain shade the window, while a 20th-century French Directoire painted daybed, which the clients use as the baby’s crib, feels timeless. To the right of the window are two wooden collages by Frank Hannon and, below that, a still-life by Tim Braden.
Sarah Kelley9/9Despite being tucked away in a former storage area under the front stairs, the garden-level powder room exudes romance. That’s thanks to its tropical-motif toile wallpaper, a wall-to-wall honed Carrara marble vanity skirted with chartreuse silk, and a Trove wall mirror that Duggan describes as “an updated take on a classic Queen Anne shape.”
