A London home that is a chinoiserie wonderland | Design Notes: Hannah Cecil Gurney of De Gournay

Georgie.

Is this your bedroom?

Yeah.

Yeah?

Is this your big boy bed?

Yeah.

Yeah?

Is this your wallpaper?

No?

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[Hannah] I wanted to create a home where

when my friends and family come and visit it,

it transports them somewhere else,

and each room they go into changes their mood

and makes them feel something.

Whether it makes them feel happy and cozy

or whether it makes them feel...

excited and vibrant.

I knew that all the other rooms were gonna be crazy colorful

because I'm slightly color obsessed,

and so I decided to go for this chocolate brown wallpaper.

It's called, Coco Coromandel,

because it's based on the famous coromandel screens

in Coco Chanel's apartment.

This one is painted to look like lacquer inlay.

I found these the other day, squirreled away,

and these are really beautiful

de Gournay watercolor renderings.

So when my father was first doing rooms of wallpaper

for his initial clients,

this was how we used to present the concepts to them.

There's something so beautiful

about seeing the wallpaper rendered

in the room in miniature totally by hand in watercolor.

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This is the kitchen dining room.

My husband loves cooking and then we have friends around,

and he doesn't want us all to sort of abandon him

in the living room while he cooks,

so it ends up becoming a really sociable space.

The wallpaper in here is a slightly tropical take

on a chinoiserie.

I was thinking of doing something more subtle for the chairs

and then of all the fabrics I found actually,

this Bennison fabric is the one that looked the best

with the wallpaper because it balanced it.

These lights are from Urban Electric.

They make beautiful lights in the U.S.

And they also did the lights upstairs in my bathroom.

And everything is totally customizable.

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When George arrived, I decided to do a custom version

of the fish, so we took our fishes design,

which is quite well known,

and we made a whole kind of underwater world.

It took me forever to try and find a rug that worked

in the space, and then recently the rug company

launched this really beautiful Obie rug.

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I love the fabric of this blind,

which is a CNC Milano fabric.

It's got these really beautiful embroidered bubbles

all over it.

Or at least I think that they look like bubbles,

so I thought it was perfect for the room.

And it's a Robert Allen fabric that we used

for the curtains.

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The starting point for this room was that I knew

I really wanted to use black and white

with really, really strong primary colors,

so we used our African savanna de Gournay

hand-painted wallpaper.

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I did the pelmet and then added this really beautiful

Samuel and Sons trim.

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My absolute favorite thing about this bedroom is the color.

It's really, really beautiful to live with these kind

of like pinky, orangey colors.

It's beautiful to wake up to.

It's beautiful in the evening when it's lit with lamps.

It's a really beautiful color on your skin as well,

so actually someone once told me that it would make me look

much better if I had my room this color,

so I'm trying to trick my husband still.

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With a feminine chinoiserie wallpaper like this,

I love to pair it with a much more kind

of bold geometric pattern.

That is a chair that I got for €30,

which I reupholstered in a Dedar fabric.

I just love that it's slightly three-dimensional.

You want to touch it.

It's more interesting than having a printed fabric.

This bathroom is a great example

of me not being an interior designer,

because I've mixed all sorts of weird things together.

It's sort of like Hollywood meets Palm Beach

meets something more English and classical.

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After a long day of working, there's nothing nicer than

just snuggling up on the sofa in a really cozy room

and just forgetting that the world's outside,

and that was kind of when I designed this room,

was what I had in mind.

This is designed by Alessandra Branca,

and I've recolored it to suit the room.

It's on a wool satin, which is a really lovely fabric

'cause it has the luxurious texture of the satin,

but it's knocked back so you don't have the shine.

There was quite a lot of decoration faux pas

before getting to this final design that you see now.

It has taken me about 4 years

to feel like everything is now suddenly harmonious.

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