Boho style interiors: how one designer carved a home out of a derelict Victorian workshop — filling it with vibrant shades

There’s a generation of London-based designers more fascinated by history than by our tech-obsessed present.

Their studios and homes exude confidence and are cluttered with things previous generations might have bypassed: clashing pattern, unusual colour combinations and whimsical bric-a-brac.

While many people today are on a mission to declutter, these young boho designers happily accumulate stuff.

For them the past, with its multiple layers and references, provides endless inspiration.

This flamboyant, uninhibited approach is a hallmark of interior designer Rachel Chudley’s work, as it is of many of her contemporaries, notably her friend, the artist and designer Luke Edward Hall.

These young creatives’ inspirations range from the hand-decorated homes of the Bloomsbury Group and the colourful art of David Hockney to Bloomsbury homeware shop Pentreath & Hall, co-owned by architectural designer Ben Pentreath and artist and maker Bridie Hall.

Chudley has given free rein to her taste at her east London home, shared with her actor husband Nico Kaufman.

As you step inside through huge glass doors into the cosy but roomy kitchen, trailing ivy cascades from hanging baskets against a wall painted glossy midnight blue.

Sumptuously contrasting copper-clad kitchen units span one wall and apricot-coloured, antique fabric embroidered with pheasants drapes the kitchen table.

On a wall-mounted, cottage-style dresser, willow pattern plates are jumbled up with champagne coupes and a kitsch cockatoo-shaped teapot.

Chudley’s passion for charmingly old-world interiors was sparked by childhood visits in the Nineties to Highgate House, a characterful hotel in Northamptonshire, run by her grandmother: “It had woodblock-printed pineapple-motif wallpaper everywhere. It wasn’t exactly tasteful and that’s been a big inspiration to me.”

Chudley is also a fan of Paul Poiret, the early 20th-century fashion and interior designer: “I love people whose work straddles different disciplines. I also like the work of Eileen Gray and other successful women modernist designers.”

Chudley read history of art at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. She then studied interior design in California and met Nico in the US. Later, with fellow graduate Cassie Beadle, she co-founded a company called Guts for Garters, which displayed art and design in The Cob Gallery in Camden.

Since founding her design studio, clients have included her friend, playwright Polly Stenham, whose striking Bloomsbury home boasts a semicircular pink chesterfield sofa and jade green bathroom, and fashion accessories queen Lulu Guinness. Chudley is currently designing the latter’s new Covent Garden flagship store.

This year, London craft fair Collect, to be held for the first time at Somerset House, from February 27 to March 1, has invited Cox London, designer-makers of bespoke furniture, to create the interior and furniture of the VIP lounge in collaboration with Chudley, who is curating the space.

She shows me a sketch of the room, painted a storm cloud grey.

The colour was formulated by her father-in-law, New York-based artist Donald Kaufman, a former member of the US Abstract Expressionist movement.

“I researched Somerset House’s history at the British Library, which inspired the room’s décor,” says Chudley. A key piece of furniture is the new eccentric, free-form Sofamans sofa whose upholstery is worn in places, exposing parts of the wood frame, hessian and webbing, topped with a soft lambswool fleece.

There’s a similar sense of layers unpeeled at Chudley’s home. “We’re in Old Bethnal Green Road, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert built workshops for skilled immigrants specialising in cabinet-making,” she says. “Nico and I spotted a sign advertising a workshop for sale. We sneaked past some doors into a cobbled yard and were confronted by a derelict building.

It even had a tree growing out of one wall. It was crazy but we put in an offer. We had to show architects’ drawings proving that we’d do something good for the street, not just build a dull block of flats.” Their architects, vPPR, reconstructed the ramshackle building, increased its height by 1.5 metres and added a new extension.

“It was a massive project and took a year to complete during which we lived in a caravan on site,” recalls Chudley. “We wanted to retain the old building’s original fabric and matched the new bricks with those of the old ones.”

The windows are inspired by those of local light industrial buildings. A skylight in the kitchen above the dark blue wall provides a view of a Fifties brutalist apartment block by Denys Lasdun, best known for his design of the National Theatre on the South Bank.

“People say it’s best to avoid dark wall colours as they make rooms look smaller but with daylight on it, the deep blue here doesn’t have that effect, while its reflective gloss finish makes the room look bigger.” Another skylight brings light into the living room, with its oversized fireplace made of bricks stepped on one side.

A seascape, painted by Chudley’s ancestor, Fred Mayor, a British Impressionist, inspired the fireplace’s smoky blue hue. This was created by Kaufman senior, who also devised sludgy but harmonious paint shades for other rooms.

Strong colour and pattern abound in the living room, with Moroccan rugs, yellow curtains made from sari fabric, a leopard-print sofa, a glistening bronze and stone table by Cox London and an ottoman covered with a shaggy hide dyed a shade that Chudley calls “Honey Monster yellow”.

Trompe l’oeil wallpaper with a pattern of flaking plaster lines an adjoining corridor with a staircase rising to the main bedroom. Here an asymmetric burnt-orange headboard, designed by Chudley, was inspired by curvy motifs on an enormous Suzani blanket hung on a wall by the bed and by the leafy forms of two metal bedside lights. An en suite bathroom is informally separated by a wooden partition with large windows, allowing light to flood both spaces.

Visitors to Collect’s VIP room will get a taste of Chudley’s imagination. More monochrome than her home, it still captures her romantic fascination with the past.