Hoppen glory

Battersea-based interiors guru Kelly Hoppen speaks to Lucie Greene about motivations, multi-tasking and working on the Los Angeles home of David and Victoria Beckham

Above: Kelly Hoppen

Nestling on a quiet cobbled mews street in West Kensington, amidst cottages, flower boxes, and brightly painted doors, is Kelly Hoppen HQ. From the outside it looks inconspicuous enough, but once led inside through the entrance corridor, the machine unfurls. An open-plan office sees workers busily answering phones, operating in hushed frenzy. The reception is flanked by a glass wall which looks into a garage containing a polished-within-an-inch-of-its-life Porsche with personalized number plate (reading K33KEL, what else?), with the backdrop of ‘Kelly Hoppen’ emblazoned in hip hop style graffiti on the wall.

Upstairs sits the woman herself, in an office synonymous with her image, calm, balanced, muted, with neatly stacked coffee table books and flower arrangements. In person Hoppen is petite, tanned and immaculately groomed. She’s also amazingly poised for someone who has quite so much going on. After all, today Kelly Hoppen is more than an interior designer; she’s a fully-fledged lifestyle brand. She has roster of celebrity clients including Victoria and David Beckham (who’s LA home she is currently working on. “She’s a great friend and I’m happy to help because she’s incredibly busy.”), Gary Rhodes – whose restaurant Rhodes W1 she recently designed, not to mention to starlet step-daughters in the shape of Sienna and Savannah Miller, from her previous marriage to banker Ed Miller.

She’s also notched up accolades including the European Women of Achievement Award for Entrepreneurship, 2007 (EWAA), the Grazia Award in the Design & Architecture category, the Andrew Martin International Designer of the Year Award in 1997, and nods from an Elle Decoration and Homes & Garden to boot. Then there’s the retail, the stores in London, New York, the paint range, the Wedgwood collection of table wear, the diffusion interiors range at BHS, the furniture, the carpets, the taps, and the fabrics. Oh, and the small matter of five interiors each now published in five different languages. Her sixth; Kelly Hoppen Home: From Concept to Reality, is due out this autumn.

“I just wish I had more time to do it. I’m fighting with my diary the whole time. It’s an Anneka Rice challenge every day,” she says.

“It’s not just buying a sofa and putting a cushion on it. You are creating a lifestyle,” she says, adding. “It’s always remained the same in terms of my philosophy. I try to create interiors people can live in, not just look at. As I’ve got older I’ve got better at doing that. There was definitely a period in my youth where I just thought ‘this looks great’ but it wasn’t exactly practical. Now I get very involved in how people live in homes, and how they integrate work and family.” Hoppen’s abilities also extend to establishing interior design compromises for husband and wife clients. “I’m good at the compromise. I could be a marriage counsellor. It’s about caring. The way I succeed is by giving them both what they want but by doing it in a way that it really works.”

Does she find it easier designing for herself? “No, I just make decisions quicker. I don’t have to sit and dither and ask my husband,” she says, adding that her current residence, a penthouse apartment in a Battersea Victorian schoolhouse, which she bought last year, was virtually designed in a day. “It was like designing on the back of a cigarette packet. Although, I wish in some ways I had had more time to spend on it. But I’m very proud of how it turned out. She should be. Hoppen took the 5,000 square foot space, re-wired, ‘Zenned’ and decked it in bespoke furniture, and added a 60-foot terrace. “It’s absolutely incredible. The main room is 80 foot long! I would never have found that building in Chelsea of Notting Hill.”

Chelsea of course, is where Hoppen grew up. Born in South Africa she moved there as a young child, and has lived on virtually every on of its streets at some stage. (“Everyone jokes: ‘take her out of the royal borough and she doesn’t know where she is.’”)

Hoppen says a turning point for her life and career was the death of her father when she was still a young teenager. “I was so upset. I remember lying on his bed thinking: “This can’t be happening. It’s a big surprise when at 48 your father suddenly drops down dead. You just think: ‘Shit. Life is not that easy.’ I don’t trust it anymore. That gave me this enormous drive.

The drama didn’t end there either, when Hoppen’s inheritance, other than the flat she had secured, was taken away from her. “I could have partied everything away, but right from that very start I wanted to prove I could do it. I built everything today myself,” she says. “I have spoken to people who have lost parents and it was the same for me. You just want to prove something, although I am never sure who to.”

Surveying Hoppen’s career, it’s difficult to see any area with anything left to prove. “Your experiences in life are the things that make you. Maybe I had a mission to show that it was possible to be a mother, be a wife, be a girlfriend, businesswoman all rolled in to one. We as women are good at multi-tasking. We can brush our hair and put tights on at same time, whereas men can scratch balls and wipe their nose and that’s about it,” she jokes, wryly.

Did she always know she had a talent for design? “That I knew. I never questioned it. I just did it. I was totally self-taught. You have to believe in yourself. There are people I think who can only get to a certain point because they put boundaries in front of themselves. Whereas some people keep moving the goal posts. I’m like that. I’m always someone who has stepped outside the box and looked at things from all angles. There are days I want to be back in my box,” she says. “But most days I’m quite fearless.”

Kelly Hoppen Home
From Concept to Reality
Published by Jacqui Small
Priced £30
www.kellyhoppen.com