AT HOME WITHMATTHEW WILLIAMSON
Damian Russell - Photographer Alyce Taylor - Stylist
As the fashion-turned-interior designer launches his new homeware collection for John Lewis, he opens the doors of his colour-drenched London home
Matthew Williamson’s flair for bold, decorative interiors was honed during his career as a fashion designer. ‘In some ways, I see my career in fashion as training to be an interior designer,’ says Williamson, who, in the early 2000s, was at the beating heart of the British creative scene, along with his friends and muses Sienna Miller and Jade Jagger.
Inside his elegantly vibrant north London home, the ornate and the contemporary are combined in perfectly mismatched harmony throughout the ground-floor Victorian apartment. This signature aesthetic – one that the designer tags ‘rustic decadence’ – is also threaded through his eye-catching new homeware collection for John Lewis. ‘I like you to walk into a room and your eyes to dart around like a firefly,’ he says. ‘I always want my work to have an element of joy. It’s meant to make you feel better in some small shape or form. These are very optimistic pieces that are meant to elevate the everyday.’
Walk into the expansive, light-filled living room and there is an instant mood change. Here, the walls are drenched in a softer tone of dusky pinkish brick. ‘I think of this pink as a neutral. It’s sort of my beige or grey,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to live in grey or beige, but at the same time I want a backdrop for accessories and furniture that can be a little more jewel-toned.’
This love affair with colour and pattern is rooted in Matthew’s Mancunian childhood, when helping his receptionist mother choose her outfits for work was a cherished ritual: ‘She introduced me to the idea that fashion could be mood-boosting and lift the spirits of those around you.’ Incidentally, his mother was also a fiercely house-proud John Lewis customer (Matthew specifically recalls ‘a pine dining table that was saved up for, for months on end’) and this deep-rooted emotional connection with the store brings resonance to his new collection: ‘Totally a passion project.’
“I always want my work to have an element of joy. It’s meant to make you feel better in some small shape or form”
His aim was to create uncompromising pieces (‘the lamp I would want, the cushion I would want’) that work in different environments. The signature peacock velvet cushion distils his aesthetic in one show-stopping wow: it’s designed both as a standalone statement piece to inject a minimalist space with a visual pop and, for the maximalists out there, can be piled high in mismatching stacks.
The unexpected mix of sweet, fairytale woodsiness and lacquered high glam sounds like an impossible visual cocktail, but it works. In fact, the Twiggy Mirror is rather like a brooch to put on your wall. And really, who could resist that?
Photography: Damian Russell
Styling: Alyce Taylor
As featured in At Home magazine, out in John Lewis and Waitrose stores from 11 April.
