Bridge For Design Spring 2014 Bridge For Design Spring 2014 Issue | Page 84

IN CONVERSATION | Nicholas Haslam

An interior must evolve
if it is to be successful
In this extract from the design interior book Luxury Minimal
Nicholas Haslam talks about his style and colour passions
Photographs FRITZ VON DER SCHULENBURG | Text KAREN HOWES / The Interior Archive

‘I

compose an interior like a musical score. It starts on paper
and I gradually build up the layers, adding and eliminating
as that initial sketch takes shape.
Dorothy Draper was among the first women in America to
see interior decorating as a commercial profession. I’m mad about
her strong style! A room she did at Rockefeller Center in New York
was immediately hailed as ‘frozen music’.
My first interpretation almost automatically starts with a ‘classic’
plan, and progresses using light and reflection for balance, as only
then can one start minimalising. People now are fixated on ‘light’,
and want far too much. Rooms should not be glaringly floodlit;
they should sparkle with light.
Colour is more my thing, and it is influenced both by natural
and artificial light, so, by applying paint and pattern in textures
and layers, I can create endless different effects and permutations.
It is important in any decorative scheme to remember that the eye
needs to absorb the atmosphere of a room and to create its own
interpretation of the whole.
Depending on the project or my mood, I can be influenced by
both designers and architects. Yet I consider myself to be neither.
Both professions tend to be somewhat bloodless, lacking passion.
I am essentially a decorator, a beautifier. I add drama and the
unexpected.
A decorator’s approach to colour must be self-assured. Whereas
confidence is commonplace and often misplaced, assurance is
both bold and subtle.
Nancy Lancaster was one of the assured combiners of colour.
In one house she painted one room pink, the one next to it blue.
When complimented on the unlikely combination, she pointed out
that it was the colour of the air, where the colours met, that was
beautiful.

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Bridge for Design Spring 2014

Mrs Lancaster also had the one really successful yellow room in
England, which, much to her annoyance, I described once as ‘butter
yellow’! Yellow isn’t a colour I use much in this country, despite the
old nonsense about ‘sunny’; the reflection of so much natural green
and grey outside works against it.
My favourite colour, one which I use over and over again, I call
‘ashes of lilac’. It’s a kind of grey violet tinged with a sable brown.
It’s the colour of shadows in old French floral chintzes. I love greys
and browns and dull mauves, ‘grauve’ in my mind. They work for
both Neoclassical and Minimal projects.
While some may raise an eyebrow at the mere suggestion of
my being considered a Minimalist, designers haven’t ever learned
Maximalism.
My work hasn’t become stuck in a rut; never a recipe. It’s important
for designers often to critique their output, change their style, their
aims, even in my case their appearance. Besides, Minimalism is
essentially a case of elimination, of pairing away. It is static as
opposed to fluid, and creates a void in which the decorator has to
create an atmosphere. If one gets it right the barrenness will be
eliminated.
I do not set out to achieve a restrained grandeur in my decoration,
but an interior must evolve if it is to be successful, until a certain
point is reached at which it is obvious that a degree of restraint
needs to be reintroduced. It can be as simple as walking into a
room and recognising that a certain piece of furniture or an object
needs to be removed, or, conversely, that a shape or a piece is missing
from a composition.
Paradoxically, some of the most elaborate rooms in the past have
a Minimal quality about them, and I suspect that is what this book
sets out to prove. For example, Empress Maria Theresa enlarged
the royal castle in Prague in the 18th century in the most ►