Every so often, an interior designer gets a dream commission: a blank canvas with good bones and original features, owned by adventurous clients with a ‘why not?’ attitude. This is what happened when Studio Duggan was asked by a couple with two young daughters to transform their Georgian townhouse in Islington.
‘Sometimes you have to put in a lot of work to make it feel interesting. We didn’t have to here,’ recalls the studio’s founder, Tiffany Duggan. ‘The scale of everything – the windows, reception rooms, even the skirting – was oversized, but all in proportion.’
A project of such scale could feel daunting, but Tiffany has a tried-and-tested approach that centres her clients’ tastes and hopes for their home. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to explain in words what your style is, so we shared reference imagery – they were clear on what they liked and what they didn’t. They entertain a lot, so we wanted to do something that could function as well for a party as it would when the family are just messing around together,’ she explains.
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If there’s a common thread running through Studio Duggan’s projects, it is, perhaps paradoxically, contrast. ‘Whether that’s between old and new, or between finishes – setting something rustic against something a bit slicker – it’s that difference that I find interesting,’ Tiffany says.
‘Rooms not feeling too “one thing”, whether that’s texture, material, colour or the items we’re putting in there.’ She also finds herself returning to particular shades and combinations, saying, ‘you can’t go wrong with pale blue and deep red. Dark brown or a moody baby pink also come up quite a lot in my work. I like slightly dirty colours; they throw things off a bit.’
The large double reception room is a good example; in many homes the two spaces would be decorated as one, but Tiffany cleverly used colour to give her clients a more formal party zone for entertaining friends, and a cosier family room to watch movies. Here, blue walls are paired with a vivid-pink rug that warms things up and adds a dash of fun. A bronze-painted architrave sits perfectly within the tonal scheme in each room, framing the view from one into the other and ‘stopping it from getting too pretty’.
In the kitchen and dining room on the lower-ground floor, Tiffany adopted an ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ policy, embracing the lower ceilings and lack of light with an enveloping Josephine Munsey wallpaper in the dining room.
‘It’s got iguanas within the foliage, and the pink base is good because even though the pattern is strong, it’s not too dark,’ she explains. Balancing that exuberance, the kitchen is calmer with creamy walls, green-marble counters and plenty of natural wood. Things get jazzier in the attached laundry room, but again, Tiffany contrasted playful elements, such as the checkerboard floor, with quieter finishes. ‘It’s about knowing where to press the accelerator,’ she observes.
Wherever you turn, there’s a rational explanation for every seemingly whimsical decorative choice. The humbug-striped nook in the children’s bathroom is a case in point. This, it turns out, was a smart solution to a spatial challenge. ‘We didn’t have space for a bath and a separate shower, so we created an alcove, then hung a shower curtain internally,’ explains Tiffany.
The floor coverings are a story of their own. Firmly in the ‘leopard is a neutral’ camp, Tiffany says of the study carpet, the key to keeping things chic is to choose a small-scale print and avoid shiny finishes. In the bedroom, Studio Shamshiri’s ‘Snake and Pomegranate’ rug for Christopher Farr quietly catches the eye without detracting from the calm scheme. ‘It’s more of a statement than the leopard carpet, but again, it’s quite simple – for a huge snake!’ she says.
By blending her subtly assured way with colour with her clients’ fondness for wildlife, and always respecting the dignity of this house, Tiffany has created a warm, flexible frame for family living. The result is refined without taking itself too seriously, helped surely by the fact that her clients ‘embraced the odd bit of madness’, as she says, laughing. studioduggan.com
