Interiors

Bella Freud Modeled Her London Shop After Her Own Home

Complete with personal snapshots of Kate Moss with her father, Lucian Freud.

Bella Freud Modeled Her London Shop After Her Own Home

Even if you haven’t heard of designer Bella Freud, you’ve no doubt seen her work. The “Ginsberg is God” or “1970” sweaters she makes are nearly ubiquitous at this point, having been launched into our collective consciousness when Kate The Great herself was spotted wearing one. And then theres the fact that her name is familiar, as in Lucian (her father, the painter), or Sigmund (her great-grandfather, the father of psychoanalysis).

Ignoring that last name for a moment, upon meeting her, you could be forgiven for assuming that shes a rock goddess—she has that mysterious swagger and aura of deep cool that comes with that territory. And actually, you wouldnt be that far off. Yes, now she primarily designs clothes, but she’s also directed films, worked as a journalist, consulted on other people’s collections—and we were too intimidated to ask, but we’re pretty certain that every one of her friends is a creative legend also.

Freud now has something of a lifestyle line, with clothing (and not just knitwear, but blazers, trousers, dresses, silk blouses, and on and on), as well as pillows, throws, scented candles and fragrances—all of it housed in her Marylebone shop on Chiltern Street. The shop itself was intended to feel like an extension of Freud’s home. And with her own personal collection of art on the walls, and an unexpected mix of paint colors, it definitely doesn’t feel like any shop we’ve ever visited.

Click through to see just what we mean, and to hear how you can make colors like pink, yellow, and red work in your own home.


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“I told [my perfumer] the stories behind how I imagined, for example, ‘Ginsberg is God’ if it was going to be a person. There’s this picture of John Cocteau where he’s writing and he’s wearing these slipper boots, but he’s a curly-haired young guy and he’s writing on paper, and I think the whole thing of paper and a pencil or pen is sexy—that’s somebody’s idea flowing down their arm onto the page. That was my kind of image, and all those beat poets—how they did things and how they kind of went against the grain. I’m interested in that, so that was the personality. I suppose it’s the eroticism of the mind kind of thing.”

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