‘People say that you can’t really use colour in industrial spaces. Well, we have.’ You’d expect a little rule-bending from the tireless Tricia Guild, who has spent more than 50 years injecting homes with her vibrant, know-it-when-you-see-it aesthetic and love of florals.
Her husband Charles Mador (they married last year) is the founder of Mador Architects, a practice that takes similar pleasure in celebrating the natural world.
When Charles’s long-time clients called to say they’d bought a former car workshop in Shepherd’s Bush, it seemed only sensible for the couple to join forces.
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A previous stab at a conversion was something closer to a comedy of errors, having installed such delights as a part-mezzanine without any headroom, a kitchen in a corridor and a single wood burning stove to heat the whole place.
‘Our client’s mother saw it and thought they’d made a catastrophic mistake,’ laughs Charles. Sensing the potential for further scepticism, her father was banned entirely. What it did have was decent floorspace, industrial proportions and an unusual layout that the pair were keen to lean into.
‘Everything is usually “ironed out” in contemporary buildings, with little room for odd spaces or quirkiness – but I think surprises are important,’ says Charles.
The roof was replaced and the entrance to the home restructured – you now walk in via a long, curving tiled hallway. Swathed in Designers Guild’s mossy ‘Glass Green’ paint, it’s a lush, glass-topped indoor conservatory.
There’s another surprise as the full scale of the living area unfolds beyond a second pair of steel doors. Predictably, colourist Tricia has done plenty of clever things with paint (‘we had colours for the rooms before I had the rooms,’ says Charles), creating depth with a finely-judged double act of greens she says ‘gives the space more shape’.
Another win is the tough stainless steel and concrete kitchen, ‘made domestic’ by a precise forest shade on the cabinets. ‘I always say to everybody that you need a starting point,’ explains Tricia.
Here it was Designers Guild’s own ‘Gertrude Rose’, a painterly floral fabric which covers a vintage Steen Østergaard lounge chair and functions like a moodboard in miniature. ‘Everything is in that piece of fabric,’ she says, from the softened emerald greens to the sugary pink picked up in the main bedroom.
If this house was a season, it could only be spring. Thankfully the wider family is now won over, including poodles Frida and Billy, who make Tricia twitch when they curl up on her company’s fabrics. ‘They give me this look and head straight for the nicest cushions!’ designersguild.com; mador.co.uk
