Elle Decor - Look sharp
"Suzanne and Christopher Sharp transform their Notting Hill Victorian with a mix of heirlooms and antiques – and jolts of colour.
Christopher and Suzanne Sharp call their colourful Notting Hill home an “unidirectional ship.” By this the couple, who own the Rug Company, Britain’s handmade carpet-emporium, mean that there was no master plan, no painstakingly detailed artchitectural drawings, and no fleet of decorators and builders...
...Living near both Portobello and Goldbourne Road markets, home to hundreds of small antiques dealers and eclectic home-design shops, helps too. Here the Sharps have found many of the furnishings – a handblown Murano glass chandelier, an antique gilded mirror, and antique French linene sheets that were made into curtains – that fill the 1880 house, which they share with their four children, Nicolas, 15, Sophie 13, Jack 11, and Jamie 3. Faily heirlooms also play a part, as do pieces brought back back from the pair’s frequent trips to Malta, Morocco and India. In fact, it was in the early ‘90s, while they were in the Middle East, where Christopher was producing documentaries, that they got the idea of starting the Rug Company. “We spent a lot of time there,” explains Suzanne, “and for shopaholics there wasn’t much to do other than look at carpets.”
Now those rugs are featured in nearly every room of their house. After initial collaborations with decorators like Nina Campbell and Nicky Haslam, an introduction to Consuelo Castiglioni of Marni by British Vogue fashion director Lucinda Chambers led the Sharps in a new and more colourful direction, incorporating the work of fasion designers like Matthew Williamson, Diane von Furstenberg, and Paul Smith.
“Fashion designers really understand colour, and they’re used to constantly coming up with new ideas,” Suzanne says. “Paul is such a great enthusiast,” adds Christopher. “He puts all of his energy into design.” When Smith produced LOVE – a wallhanging displayed in daughter Sophie’s room – for the Rug Company, it became an instant bestseller. (Indeed, reports Christopher, the cast of Love Actually, which was filming nearby, bought them for each other.)
The children’s rooms reflect Suzanne’s irreverent sense of humor, love of colour, and weakness for salvage-yard finds. In Jack’s room, a repainted junk-shop bed from Portobello Road is framed by cowboy wallpaper and a Union Jack rug, while in Sophie’s room, an antique white-painted metal daybed, Cath Kidston wallpaper in pink and white, and curtains of vintage floral fabrics give the space a distinctly feminine feel. Lately, though, the art direction has proved a bit difficult. “They’re beginning to have their own ideas,” says Suzanne. For instance, she would love to change the Melita rug in Nicolas’s room that she designed for the Rug Company two years ago, but he’s not having any of it. “He won’t be separated from it,” she shrugs.
Actually the rugs are among the few things that get a reprieve whenever she starts earmarking things for Lots Road, a small auction house in South London. What remains, too, are Suzanis from Uzbekistan and a Bedouin marriage shawl found in Morocco and draped over a footstool. “We’ll get rid of a piece of furniture if it proves impractical,” Christopher says. But even with the Rug Company’s burgeoning success – the Stateside outpost they opened two years ago in SoHo recently doubled in size – the couple have no plans for a major overhaul of their lifestyle. “We’re not going to be buying a fitted Italian kitchen,” he adds, shaking his head. It’s the pink-painted kitchen, after all, that sums up this family’s life. Two clocks are set, one to London time and the other to New York time, allowing the children to keep tabs on their parents. “Jamie, our youngest, likes to know where we are every minute,” says Christopher, grinning at the role reversal that suits him just fine."
