Adam Bray is a London-based interior designer with over 30 years of working on interesting and diverse projects, who also has a shop in Camden which stocks a beguiling array of antiques as well as his own fabric and furniture designs. Described by House and Garden as ‘Brave and creative with colour, he knows his stuff when it comes to interesting antique pieces’.
We collaborated with Adam on two designs: Hardwick and Blizzard, both versatile and vastly applicable – clever in their seemingly unpretentious simplicity but adding a rich layer of design detail to any scheme. There is a charm and wit to them that is reflective of Adam himself; a magnetic, knowledgeable and warm character, full of interesting references and a crisp humour.
What draws you to broadloom/fitted carpet?
I love it for several reasons; its neatness and simplicity, the sound quality it brings to a room and the general feeling of making somewhere feel pulled together.
When you are designing, where does the carpet fit into the schedule of things?
There used to be an Advert in AD in the 1980’s that had the strap-line ‘the carpet is the soul of the apartment’. We pretty much always stick to this rule whether we are specifying rugs, carpets or a fitted broadloom.
Do you have any tips or tricks when it comes to carpets?
Contrary to what people might think, I actually feel that darker saturated carpet colours can make a room feel taller and more spacious, there’s no science to it, but it feels like that to me.
You are a great collector of references and inspiration, what draws you to things?
I’m very nostalgic, I grew up watching lots of black and white movies and listening to jazz in a dusty dark mansion flat in Baker Street. I like the idea of the past, of a richness and quality and sense of timelessness. I try to channel that in my design work and in the antiques I buy for the shop. I also like things that are slightly off and very personal.
What is your design ethos/signature?
I try to keep a consistent quality through everything on a project regardless of age or ethnicity. Allowing everything to feel appropriate to the client’s personality and feel right for the type of house or apartment. In order for anything to be successful you need to have a solid architectural box to work in, and once that’s done you’re away…
Tell us about the inspiration for the Collaboration designs?
The Hardwick flatweave was inspired by a cutting of something from the 1960s that we rescued when we were stripping a project out about 20 years ago, and it sat unused in a box until Peter and I started talking about what we might do together and it just seemed right. Hardwick is woven in wool without any lustre to match the delicious dry texture of the original piece, taking that sense of drabness and making it sing. The Blizzard broadloom is a pattern that was often used in the 1930s and sits somewhere between a polka dot and an animal print. Blizzard is woven in its original Clay colour way and three elegant new colours.
The colour ways are ‘very Adam Bray’, do you have a go to palette/how do you pick the colours?
Colour is endlessly fascinating. I spend a lot of time wandering around museums, sometimes going to look at just one picture and thinking about how the painter mixed the colours – how each hue is made of individual tones and shades – sometimes pulling colour apart like that helps focus a palette. For the broadloom particularly, I was thinking about the colours you see in paintings by Leger from the 1920s. I thought a lot about the colours I liked to use and the rooms that might suit the designs, imagining them coming to life in situ, and we developed the designs from there.
How do you envision them being used?
Obviously in vast quantities throughout enormous houses by people who love them….
