An Eccentric Town House in Islington by Design Star Rachel Chudley

A while baxck, our London correspondent Christine sent me a late-night missive to say she’d met a promising young designer at a dinner. “I sat next to this lovely interior designer last night at the Ochre party (which was fab, by the way). Her name is Rachel Chudley, and she is married to the son of paint colorist Donald Kaufman and she only uses Donald’s paint. With her personality and work, I think she is a rising star on the London design scene.”

Of course, I quickly Googled “Rachel Chudley” and was instantly entranced. Her work is fresh and quirky and hard to pin down stylistically; a mix of antiques and modern (so hard to pull off) with unexpected color. And it doesn’t look like anything else we’ve seen lately.

“I’ve loved interiors, art, and color since I was small,” Rachel says. “I studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and went on to intern at Thurston/Boyd Interiors in Laguna Beach, California. I then worked in the art world, at the Cob Gallery, where I curated exhibitions of art and design with my great friends Victoria Williams and Cassie Beadle. The exhibitions were centered around themed interiors and provided a platform for us to play creatively with art and design. My first interior job really came from there. My style is playful with a focus on color and texture. At odds with formalized style, it reflects the environment of our clients: their quirks, passions, and humor. Art is at the center of my practice; I look at color and compositions in artworks to get inspiration for my interiors. I believe art and artful living can bring moments of joy into everyday life.”

Join us for a tour of a town house in Islington, which Rachel designed for an artistically inclined writer friend:

Photography by Sean Myers, courtesy of Rachel Chudley.

“I try to look at the challenges of a house as an opportunity to try interesting design choices, and work with the natural personality of a space rather than against it,” Rachel says. “We love Donald Kaufman Color, of course; the paints are a revelation and have the power to make a room come alive. For this house, Don created custom colors for most of these rooms.”

We asked Rachel for her favorite sources, and this is what she told us: “Fabrics from Abbott & Boyd, as well as Clarence House. I love architectural salvage purveyor Lassco in London’s Brunswick House—fabulous finds and a great restaurant. Also Pure White Lines in East London and Dimore Studio and Fornasetti in Milan.”

“We looked into the feeling of the house as a whole when considering the paint colors,” Rachel says. “The large, dark lower ground floor was split into two spaces; we painted half of this space in a soft, light color, with the wainscoting painted in a deeper color to pull both spaces together while defining them and turning one large space into two more manageable ones.”

For more quirky English spaces, see:

• A Notting Hill Townhouse Tailored for Living by Charles Mellersch
• Going to the Dark Side with Mad About the House in London
• A Free-Spirited Film Director at Home in London