"Don't Get Bogged Down With Being Too Chic" — Design Director of Firmdale Hotels Minnie Kemp on Her 7 Lessons in Decorating With Personality

British interior designer Minnie Kemp has little interest in rooms that are merely tasteful. For the Design Director of Firmdale Hotels, the best interiors are the ones that make you smile, make you look twice and reveal something about the person who lives there. Her own home, she says, has been compared to "a Roald Dahl novel", which feels about right.

What makes her rooms memorable is not simply the color or pattern, but the way ideas are layered together, from hand-painted tiles that reappear as rug motifs to orange candlesticks that should not work but somehow make the whole room sing.

These are the decorating lessons behind that approach.

1. "You Always Need a Starting Point"

When Minnie was given a blank dining room for the Kips Bay Decorator Show House in New York, she began with Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own. "I think it's very important that we all have a room of one's own," she says. Everyone needs their space to be creative."

That idea gave everything else a direction. The dining table evoked the forest floor, a mural referenced Duncan Grant, and art was borrowed from New York galleries. "You always need a starting point." For Minnie, that might be a book, a place, a painting, or a memory. Something strong enough to stop a room from becoming a collection of unrelated good ideas.

2. "The Trick Is Adding Another Layer"

Minnie's rooms always go that extra step. For example, the Julian Chichester basket lights over the Kips Bay dining table were already striking due to their oversized scale, but Minnie took embroidered leaves from Natasha Hulse and added them to the shades. "My trick is adding a layer so that every time anyone comes in, they spot something different."

At home, she does the same thing, albeit more quietly. A motif from a hand-painted tile might reappear later on a rug or somewhere upstairs. "There's a running thread that runs through the house that echoes back to something that you've seen before."

The key is repetition with purpose. Layering works when details speak to each other, not when a room simply contains more things.

3. "Don't Get Bogged Down With Being Too Chic"

For the same Kips Bay room, Minnie chose vivid orange candlesticks. "I was thinking, 'Oh my God, is this going to look Halloween?'" She used them anyway. "Having the orange candlesticks kind of made the space because it was one of those things that was so unexpected and really made people smile."

That instinct is central to the way she decorates. "Don't be too bogged down with being too chic. A room can be beautifully composed and still have room for something funny, bright, or a little bit wrong."

4. "I Try to Mess With the Algorithm"

Minnie is wary of what happens when everyone takes inspiration from the same places. "We're all on Instagram, and we all have the algorithm. So there is a trap that you fall into seeing the same thing over and over again."

Her solution is active resistance. "I often try to mess with the algorithm." Look at what you loved before you knew what was fashionable. Look at craft, art, fashion, childhood memories and places rather than only at other interiors. "What did you like growing up? What turns you on now?" She is particularly suspicious of rooms assembled entirely from the things that happen to be fashionable at that moment. "Try not to be led by interior design trends."

5. "You Do Have to Have a Sense of Place"

For a house in Roquebrune on the French Riviera, Minnie began with the history already around her. "You see across the bay is Eileen Gray's house, and already the mind is bubbling."

Pebble mosaics are part of the local visual language, which led to a 20-meter pebble mosaic running through the property, with a representation of Zeus blowing the wind down the path and a Tree of Life motif at its end. Minnie then planned hundreds of fiber-optic lights to be embedded within it to make it sparkle.

Inside, artist Julie Bolisano created recycled-glass windows that referenced stained glass (Matisse's chapel is also in the area) but felt lighter and more contemporary. "It's a new take on an old idea."

6. "It All Has to Be Curated"

Minnie loves a layered home, but she is clear that there is a point at which layering becomes clutter. "In your own home, when you're collecting and you're building over time, it does tend to become more layered than one might want."

The answer is editing. "Sometimes you have to strip it all back and start again."

Her test for whether you have gone too far? "The smell. If you start to smell dust, you've got too much stuff."

7. "Make the Most of What You Have"

At Bloomsbury Publishing, Minnie inherited a space with an ugly suspended ceiling and two awkward structural columns. Rather than conceal them, she made them more obvious. The ceiling was stripped back and sprayed Yves Klein blue. The pillars were painted with bold graphic arrows. "Sometimes if there's a horrible thing in the room, celebrate the horrible thing. It is like dressing. Make the most of what you have and show off all your lumps and bumps."

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