The utterly distinctive Maida Vale flat of interior designer and antiques dealer Adam Bray
The antiques dealer and interior designer Adam Bray describes himself as ‘very much a creature of central London’. We’re in his apartment in Maida Vale, a few streets away from Abbey Road, which he has rented for the best part of a decade from an old client who became a good friend. Occupying most of the ground floor of a stucco-fronted villa built around 1840, this is the furthest north he has ever lived, though it is only about a mile from where he was brought up. His dad had a flat on Chiltern Street in Marylebone (‘before it was smart’) and he was a product of what they call the long Sixties (that period that in fact encompasses the early to mid-Seventies) when the city still had a feeling of post-war decay and hippiedom.
‘School,’ says Adam, ‘didn't really offer me anything, I probably owe my entire education to the Westminster Library system,’ for it was there that he first developed an interest in photography and cinema. ‘Avedon, Irving Penn, French and Italian movies of the Fifties and Sixties, which I used to watch for the sex and the style. There was a sort of latent nostalgia in me for that time. The rooms in Godard films were unlike anything that I'd seen before. And when I first started getting interested in interiors, that was the period that I was drawn to. Billy Baldwin, Parish Hadley, David Hicks. It was very masculine, the sort of decorating that I liked. Although obviously, as you can see, the main inspiration for my home is the film Withnail and I,’ he laughs, gesturing to a rip in the silver Claremont damask on his sofa. ‘The whole place is totally falling to pieces.’
The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. Rips in the upholstery, a picture of Ram Dass tacked with sellotape over the sink, mantlepieces crowded with polaroids, postcards and ephemera, piles and piles of books. These things are the seasoning to Adam’s characteristic recipe of strong colours, excellent textiles (some antique, some of his own design), mid-century Italian lighting and ‘big lumps’ of 19th- and 20th-century English furniture. A look, counterbalancing the Bohemian and urbane, which could only really have been cultivated in the febrile, cosmopolitan climate of his home city. It has earned him a cult following, a list of film people and pop stars as clients, and longstanding collaborations with brands like Soane Britain, Vanderhurd, Plain English and Papers and Paints.
‘Old furniture has always been at the heart of the decorating work really. I understand that,’ he says. ‘And the rest of it is about catering to your basic human needs: a decent sound system, a big TV, no overhead lights but enough lamps to read by, comfortable chairs and storage. That’s basically “The Look.”'
Adam left school at 16, and for a moment contemplated training as a hairdresser in his grandmother's salon, before his father marched him to the job centre and a place was found at an antiques shop on Marylebone High Street. ‘It was a strange outfit, run by a very Edwardian chain-smoking, tea-drinking lady. My job was unpacking boxes and washing things. Stuff you’d probably need a PHD to do nowadays. I thought, “that sounds like I'm not going to be disturbed too much and I'll get a lunch break.” Turns out it was a totally natural place for me. My career has been one of those weird things that sort of found me, rather than me finding it.’
The antiques scene in London at that time was booming, and Adam found himself scooped up by an older generation of dealers who became mentors. ‘Antiques dealing in many ways is like an oral tradition. London at that time had a very strong market, and it was a tight and nurturing community. When I look at younger dealers now, I think they must really struggle because that has really dissipated.’
By the time he was 25, it was the mid-90s and Adam, already almost a decade into his career, found himself with a shop in what was at the time a very hot street off Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill. ‘I had a big network of dealers that I'd worked with, and my interests were becoming broader and broader. I was going to Paris and looking at the dealers there. They'd had that whole Eighties design boom with Wilmotte and Stark. London felt a bit brown and boring by comparison. I wasn't consciously trying to be clever in how I juxtaposed things. I was just buying what I liked and hoping it would work, and it sort of did. Partly I think because of the novelty of it. The dealers that I was working with were amazing, so I had very high quality things for someone of my age. I didn't sell that much, which was one of the reasons the shop closed. But it did look great.’
And he had amazing clients; Donna Karen, Lucien Freud, Anish Kapoor, John Galliano. ‘That was an astonishing thing for me. It was almost a fantasy in itself to have the things that I liked being approved of by people like that. I wasn’t so much a dealer for collectors, I was a dealer for people who were doing up houses.’
By the time the shop closed Adam was single with two young children and the dealing had ‘very accidentally’ turned into decorating. ‘I was helping someone with paint colours. Then I got involved with the decoration of the clubs belonging to the Birleys, who had phenomenal taste. And people like Hugh Henry (of Mlinaric Henry & Zervudachi), who'd been a very good customer of mine at the shop, really encouraged me. I started getting very interested in how surfaces worked with the antiques. How you could fiddle about with fabrics and contrast them with marble, painted timber, lacquer – the different feeling you could impart by doing that.’
At one point Adam was working on three houses for a particular client, ‘and she said, I have this flat, why don't you just stay there while you’re working on these projects. Now she can't get me out,’ he laughs. ‘I'm sort of rooted here. My children have grown up here with the furniture being sold out from under them.’
The flat has two bedrooms; one used by his boys when they come to stay (‘No one wants to look in there’) and the second larger one which is Adam’s office, with walls lined with industrial shelves groaning under the weight of his library of design books. A corner of the large central living space - its centrepiece a showstopping chimneypiece in Brescia Violette marble flanked by 1960s studio speakers - is cordoned off with wooden Jomain Baumann screens from the 1940s which conceal Adam’s bed. ‘It’s a bit weird, but it works for me. I make a fire, I listen to some music. I’ve got the football on TV. What more could you really need?’
Adam has a shop again – ‘something I swore I’d never do.’ But post-pandemic the shape of his life had changed. His children were grown up, his weekends were quieter, he was finding pieces he didn’t immediately want to use in projects. Open by appointment, it feels like an extension of his home. ‘When I'm fiddling about and rearranging the shop, I see what I've got in a new light. If I’m ever feeling stuck or frustrated I come here and move things around and life generally feels better.’
Mark Anthony Fox1/13In the kitchen cork floor is covered by an antique Moroccan rug. The lantern is also Moroccan and made from recycled sardine tins.
Mark Anthony Fox2/13The other side of the kitchen has walls panelled in mirror and surrounded by fairy lights. The door to the left leads to the flat's bathroom.
Mark Anthony Fox3/13A photograph of Adam's dad as a child hangs on the wall next to a chart of his son's heights taken every birthday.
Mark Anthony Fox4/13Adam's walls are lined with industral metal shelves which hold his library of books. A Pipistrello telescoping lamp from the Sixties, designed by Gae Aulenti, sits on IKEA tables.
Mark Anthony Fox5/13A table in the window of the office is laid with fabric swatches for a scheme.
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Mark Anthony Fox12/13The tiny bathroom has a wooden Japanese bath with walls in teal mosaic.
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