Vogue - Floor show
It’s not hard to spot the Sharp family at an airport. Like modern day Romanies – though flashes of Marni and multiple pairs of Converse gym shoes bely their west London roots – Chris and Suzanne and their four children, Nicolas, Sophie, Jack and Boo, are a junk shop in motion: rickety lamps, a painted wooden boat, old quilts, even a vase or two balanced precariously in the baby’s buggy. This is a family fro whom a holiday means not just the chance to travel but also a serious opportunity to shop. “We were in Kenya recently and the lady whose house we were staying in insisted that there were no shops worth visiting for miles around,” says Suzanne, “In the end, I made her take us to the nearby village and, of course, ended up buying all sorts of things from the only shop there.” That time it was kitsch tie-dye plastic mugs and wildly colourful floral tablecloths. In Egypt it was a container full of lanterns, in Africa it was baskets and in France, well, in France there’s no stopping them. “We were there last summer,” laughs Chris, who, along with Suzanne, set up the Rug Company five years ago and in that short time has managaed to quietly revolutionised the British rug trade, “and the kids were made to drive round in the sweltering heat from brocante to brocante. Suzanne was paying them 10 euros to spot signs on the side of the road and by the end, I was offering them 20 euros to keep quiet.”
It’s that sunny, white-washed Mediterranean atmosphere that is so miraculously conjured up in the Sharp’s Notting Hill house. It’s something, let’s face it, that many of us have tried (and failed) to achieve…
…The Rug Company, although originally established by Chris when the family were temporarily living in Malta (Suzanne was brought up there), really took shape when they moved back to London five years ago. The idea had come about after Chris’ work as a commercials and video editor had taken him and Suzanne to the Middle East for four years to build an editing suite for the nascent MBC network. “There was very little social life per se, so for entertainment at night we used to go down to the markets and souks and barter with the Bedouins. My interest in rugs just grew from there.” Reluctant to return from London, the Sharps spent several years living in Malta, finally returning to England so that their children could go to school in London. What greeted them when they arrived here was what Chris describes as “a very, very traditional rug industry with people selling mainly Persian and Turkish carpets.” It was also an industry beleaguered by tales of unethical use of child labour, seemingly endless closing-down sales and, in fashionability terms, a public that was shying away from the very idea of having rugs in there homes. “The whole business seemed very static, with a distinct lack of exciting new designs,” says Chris, “At the time, only very old rugs seemed to be fashionable, so we thought there was a good opportunity to open a business that, yes, sold old rugs but also introduced some great contemporary designs.”
The Sharps quickly realised that they were doing a lot of business with interior designers but that they were often coming in and not finding what they wanted. “So I had this idea,” explains Chris, “of turning to London’s leading interior designers and getting them to design their perfect rug, the rug that they thought would be best for the sort of houses they were working on.” The designers ranged from Nina Campbell to Mary Fox Linton, Ou Baholyodin to Cath Kidston, and the rugs were a soaraway success. “That then gave us the idea and the confidence to move the project forwards and approach people like Marni and Paul Smith.”
The rest is history, with the company’s Marni rugs becoming the must-have interior collectibles of the moment and others that look set to follow. “Paul Smith has just designed a new rug for us that’s a modern take on an antique Aubusson rug,” says Chris. “Bil Amberg has done two leather rugs for us and designs by Lulu Guinness, Georgina Von Etzdorf and the interior designer Alidad are all in the pipeline.” In her role as in-house designer, Suzanne’s rugs have also begun to play an increasingly important part in the company’s success. “Chris and I work very separately in the business,” she says. “He runs the company and I’m in control of the aesthetic side of things.”
The same scenario seems to have been played out at their home – Suzanne’s pretty, feminine vision permeates every part of the house. What’s interesting – considering that the men out number the girls by four to two – is that there’s a remarkable lack of resistance to her girlie decorative style. The only hint of defiance is Chris’ plan for the only room in the house still to be decorated. “I’m thinking of a dark leather, very masculine study,” he says. “Somewhere I can drink lagers and watch the football. The house is mainly Suzanne’s style, but we all have our input. The kids, for instance, really know what they like. They’re real decorators, particularly Jack.”
The children’s bedrooms are the rooms that Suzanne says she has enjoyed doing up almost the most (she even does a bit of consultancy for people looking for help on their kids’ rooms). What stands out is that the rooms are decorated, down to the last detail, with the same stylish panache as the rest of the house. Suzanne is the first to adhere to the popular view that boys’ rooms are harder to do than girls’ and while Nick’s and Jack’s have all the credentials of the dream boy’s bedroom – giant old-fashioned aeroplanes suspended from the ceiling, wooden castles on the bedside table, and so on – it is Sophie’s room where Suzanne has really let loose.
At 11 Sophie has a view on how her room should look and it was this that prompted a clever damage limitation exercise. “I decided the safest thing was to take her to Cath Kidston and tell her she could have anything she liked,” says Suzanne. “I love everything there, so I knew we couldn’t go far wrong.” It might sound controlling but she laughingly refers to an early, liberal phase when they let the kids chose the colours for their rooms. “Jack wanted black but settled for purple,” says Suzanne, “so his room looked like the vestry of a Catholic church. Sophie went for blue and red, and Nick did every wall a different colour. My biggest all time decorating disaster? That was definitely it!”
