'Worthy of Architectural Digest'

Interior design by Tatiana Pietrangeli, Angel O’Donnell

From the interior designer:

Project brief

Our homeowners – a Floridian couple Terry and Gary, and their 16-year-old daughter Logan – wanted a home from home with elevated details that wouldn’t look out of place in a five-star hotel. 

For the couple, this meant two things:

1. Creating something worthy of Architectural Digest, their all-time favourite interiors and architecture magazine.
2. Curating new museum-level queer art that they could add to their beloved collection.

For their daughter, however, elevated details meant something a little more whimsical – a dream bedroom inspired by the romanticism of a French Château.

Meeting the brief

We took the bones of a Grade II* listed building and – dare we say? – elevated them with new interior architectural details. 

Every archway, wall panel, coffered ceiling, decorative moulding and wall-to-wall joinery unit we designed celebrated this fun, global and style-conscious family. 

Salient details include:

A grand entrance

Circular forms take centre stage – from a bespoke bench seat and marble-top table to a handcrafted pendant comprising plates of embossed glass. 

Add to this, wall panels of églomisé mirror, a 1.8m-long kinetic sculpture, and a console honed from Italian marble – and the tone is set for the rest of the apartment.

A living room of two halves

There’s a sit-by-the-fire-and-welcome-guests zone, and a kick-back-and-binge-watch-movies zone. 

In the first zone, we enlarged the fireplace to make it homely, covered the chimney breast in an inky-blue polished plaster to bounce light, and built mirrored shelves and drawers either side to display books and objets.

In the second zone, decorative artists covered the main wall in gesso, gold leaf, and a hand-blended mixture of bronze and navy-blue paint. 

This was then stone buffed into a starry cosmos of tonal variations, an arresting feature that also houses a television behind a remote-operated sliding door.

Gorgeous embellishments in the principal bedroom

Bespoke ceiling mouldings, classic wood beading, bedsides covered in intricate straw marquetry, handcrafted glass and bonze sconces, a coffee table made from a patchwork of fool’s gold, a hand-painted wall mural, and a bespoke joinery unit that incorporates a television, fluted shelves and brutalist-style mantel. 

These details add new depths – new dimensions, shapes and textures – to an already impressive space.

The romanticism of a French Château

For the daughter’s dream bedroom, we blended decorative hints of floral garlands and fleur-de-lys patterns with contemporary fabrics and classic silhouettes. 

The star of the room is the rococo-style bed that sits beneath swags of drapery. 

The abundance of gathered fabric is at once extravagant and cosy, ornate and playful. 

Opposite the bed, a bespoke dressing table and cupboards – featuring 22k gold verre églomisé doors – adds to the fairytale quality of the room.

Making guests feel welcome 

This is a room our homeowners’ friends and family will thrill to stay in – with chain-hung artwork, mural wallpaper evocative of an impressionist painting, warm neutrals paired with inchyra-blue accents, a tiered chandelier, and a dressing area opposite the bed with an arched mirror that reaches up to the cornicing.

Getting down to business

In the luxuriantly dark study, built-in shelves and sloping book displays feature plants, curios and first editions while floor-to-ceiling wood panelling integrates a fold-down desk to optimise space and functionality. 

For a pop of pattern, the ceiling has been covered in a velvet fabric of surging black, cream and mushroom waves.

A meticulously sourced and authenticated collection of queer art

Notable pieces cover a David Hockney lithograph and photo collage, a Grayson Perry woodcut, a Keith Vaughan oil on canvas, a Michael Craig-Martin acrylic on aluminium, a Pierre et Gilles hand-painted photograph, and a mix of bronze and marble sculptures by Nick Hornby and Lord Leighton.

As queer art means the world to our homeowners, it was gratifying to get their thumbs-up whenever we secured a piece they longed for.

Additional considerations addressed

A tight timeline for the apartment's completion meant we weren't always able to stagger the trades and craftspeople as we would have liked. 

So our greatest challenge was co-ordinating everybody – at one point, a huge number of people were all on-site together, including:

• Various construction and decorative workers – installers, plasterers (both carved and venetian), French polishers, ceiling contractors, joiners, curtain makers, scaffolders, and electricians

• Our core team – three lead designers and a project manager

• Art professionals – two curators, a gallerist, a fine art insurance broker, a muralist, and even a sculptor who flew in from Madrid to oversee the hanging of his 1.8m-long mobile.

Sustainability

We always have sustainability front of mind, especially when there’s so much to source and curate, design and have made. 

For this project, we had to be smart with our choices:

• Ensuring that noble materials were responsibly sourced.
• Fabrics – where possible, included bamboo silk, organic cotton velvet, and yarns made of recycled wool, acrylic or PET Polyester.
• Ensuring that our joinery carcasses were constructed from composite wood, rather than traditional timber, because it’s lightweight, durable and made from reclaimed wood fibres.

Here are some of the other small but meaningful ways we championed sustainability on this project:

Process:

• We worked with a logistics company to streamline shipments and minimise our carbon footprint.

• We returned all fabric samples to their rightful stores.

Short supply chains:

• We collaborated with local workshops and artists' studios.

• These suppliers promote equality and diversity, and sustainable practices including optimising material usage, using eco-friendly finishes, and converting wood waste into central heating.

Creating a legacy home:

• Everything in this home was built to last and filled with heirlooms that Trevor and Gary's daughter will inherit

• All the art is part of a circular economy – reused, re-evaluated and ready to be loaned to museums when asked.

Summary 

Angel O'Donnell took the bones of a Grade II* listed building and elevated them with new interior architectural details. 

Every archway, wall panel, coffered ceiling, decorative moulding and wall-to-wall joinery unit they designed was a celebration of their fun, global and style-conscious client.

Story by: Trendsideas