How to make a white concrete box feel like a family home was interior stylist Deborah Sheridan-Taylor’s biggest challenge when decorating the Camden project she and her husband Jonathan built for Grand Designs.
While the house that she shares with her husband and their two daughters, aged five and seven, has an utterly sleek and contemporary shell, Sheridan-Taylor injected individual style into the décor through her eclectic sourcing and strong instinctive feeling for how to make things work.
“My whole style has always been a an eclectic mixture of things; total investment pieces, combined with things I’ve found at markets,” she says.
“When my mother died we got a lot of her beautiful old paintings, and now they’re in a modern setting, they look amazing in a new house with new light.
“I also bought an old Routemaster bus sign from Kempton Park for my husband’s 40th birthday. It’s got the original spool saying Camden Town on it and we’ve got it hanging all the way down our staircase. Where else could you find something like that?
“While living in the Hollywood hills I discovered that I’m as comfortable with mid-century modern as antique, business as casual and modern as vintage or, better still, mixing them up for something truly unique.
“The entire first floor hallway of our house has a glass roof, which totally informs each room very differently, as light changes throughout the day. There’s a lot of natural light in our home, which adds a life of its own.”
Now on the market for £3.95 million through John D. Wood, the house is something of a showcase for the former actress’s burgeoning interiors and personal styling business.
It does seem strange to sell the house of your dreams after all the stress we see on the programme though and it’s tempting to imagine that the process of appearing on the show reduces everything in the house to a reminder of the blood, sweat and tears that went into it.
Sheridan disagrees, however. “We’ve put the house on the market to see what happens. I happen to be married to an entrepreneur and things crop up and new things are proposed to him. We’re toying with things that could happen in his life and nothing’s concrete. Well, our house is concrete.
“It’s our dream home and it’s absolutely lovely living here but I do think you could recreate this. You take yourself with you.”
It’s this element of imprinting individual personality on home decor that Sheridan-Taylor likes to help her clients realise in their own spaces.
“My business is about bringing out a client’s personality, in the physical world, be that fashion or interior design.”
Deborah says hiring her is like shopping with your best friend.
“I’m not some snobby stylist who’s got fixed ideas about how things should go,” she smiles.
“Decorating your home isn’t something that you do very often so it’s easy to get into a style that you stick with for your whole life. It’s very like people’s hair. If you changed your hair completely taking a risk to do that, people would respond to you differently and you’d act differently.
“People feel safe within a certain style and I want to help give them the confidence to venture into new ground.”
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