A simple list,” says Matthew Williamson. “Twenty questions. Like,” counting on his fingers, “What’s your design icon? What’s your favourite restaurant? Do you have a treasured possession? Who’s your favourite artist? That sort of thing.” This is how fashion designer turned interior designer Williamson begins every project, sitting down with his client, creating a moodboard, before going away and thinking quite deeply about, say, the colour pink. Do you have a favourite decade? What’s your favourite scent? What’s your earliest childhood memory? But the list, he points out, isn’t just for wealthy clients – it’s useful for everybody. “If you’re renovating your kitchen and you’re struggling, which people obviously are because there’s so much choice out there online, such a barrage of visuals, it’s quite nice to use these questions to really ask yourself: what do I like?”
The quick answer, looking around his high-ceilinged London flat, is “This.” We like this, Matthew, this joyful, playful romp of a home, with its mint-green bedroom, blue doors, green doorways, sense upon walking in that you’re stepping into a grand, velvet, patch of sunlight. The living room, in which we sit today, gazing out of ceiling-height windows to the garden below, has blush pink walls (“I don’t really see it as pink, to be honest – it’s really a warmer solution to beige”) against a tobacco-coloured window alcove (“Hackney Gold it’s called. By a brand called Pickleson paint who do lovely colours, including one called Pissy Yellow”) and its elegant collection of vintage furniture lit by a glass chandelier that used to hang in his New York store.
He closed down the fashion business he’d built with his partner of 30 years Joseph Velosa (the two now have a daughter, and live between London and Mallorca) seven years ago, after decades as a household name. He looks exactly the same today as he used to in the tabloids and fashion magazines, suave and feline, nipping for cigarettes out of the window while we chat. In the 90s Williamson’s face was as recognisable as his clothes – “boho-chic” party dresses in dazzling colours, worn by Kate Moss and Sienna Miller and all their fellow it-girls. As he was launching his career, American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, looking at a dress he’d made by patchworking pink sari scraps together, told him, “You should have a pink dress in every collection.” He took her advice.
But Williams had been obsessed with the power of colour all his life. Growing up in Manchester, he saw how his mother, Maureen, an optician’s receptionist, used it as a tool to feel better. “Her everyday, artful way with colour became a fascination of mine,” he writes in his new book, Living Bright, “and later a pivotal and defining aspect of my career and lifestyle.” The book is half memoir, half generous design guide. Each chapter concentrates on a colour – how to use it to enrich and inspire, and create spaces that are “an expression of you”. Williamson favours, for instance, a “glossy red bed”, and recalls a small bathroom painted golden yellow, and loves plaster-pink walls for a non-traditional neutral, and so on, through sections on green, orange, purple and blue, insisting there are no rules, instead urging readers to play with colour. The risk, he insists, is small – the beauty of decorating is that everything can be repainted. “Embrace the colours that resonate most strongly with you and how you want to live,” he writes. “Focus on those tones and revel in the joy they will spark in yourself and those around you.”
Studying fashion at Central Saint Martins in the 90s, “My peers were doing things like going to an asylum to get inspiration. That didn’t resonate with me. I didn’t need my work to have that darkness – I wanted it to have the opposite.” He smiles. “If I’m going to make something, I want it to be something that makes you smile. There isn’t an agenda beyond that.” Perhaps that’s why, he admits, despite his success, his work has never really been considered… cool. “You know that fashion world when the work’s really analysed and critiqued? I was not part of that scene. And that’s hard as a young person, in your 20s, when your ego’s at play, and you want to be let in and you want to be cool.” But he’s 52 now, and, “Slowly I’ve worked out it’s not who I am. I’ve got to stay true to myself, and if you don’t like it,” he says slowly, “that is OK.”
All of which is not to say he didn’t have a blast in fashion. “Sure, I definitely had a moment. I was, you know, ‘on the scene’. There was definitely a glamorous facade for sure. I could turn it on, a quick interview, a red carpet, you know, it was water off a duck’s back. But I never loved it. I wasn’t doing it for that. For a glass of champagne and a schmooze. It was part of my job to be seen. And I just happened to be all right with it. Which is lucky.” He shrugs, brightly. “I remember at our first show, the models came back up off the stage,” including Kate Moss, Helena Christensen and Jade Jagger, “and then lots of press came back too, and my PR just pulled me to one side and said, ‘Are you OK to PR yourself?’” Meaning, you need to talk about yourself, Matthew Williamson – it’s not just the dresses the press are interested in, it is you – you must be the brand. “And I’m always interested in designers who’ve clearly gone ‘No’. I didn’t really understand the question at the time. In those days, people were just chucked out into the world and expected to perform.” There’s no bitterness as he looks back, more a kind of bewildered nostalgia. When the attention began he’d only recently moved to London from Manchester – as sales started streaming in, his parents moved down too, into the red curtain-swathed bedsit he and Joseph shared, mum helping with sewing, dad with deliveries. They set up the company in September 1996 – by the end of the year the label was stocked in Browns, London and Barneys New York.
It quietly exploded – in 2005, Williamson became creative director at Emilio Pucci, the LVMH-owned Italian fashion house. Two years later, to celebrate the brand’s 10-year anniversary, Prince performed at his show at New York fashion week. When they opened their first London store, fashion critic Suzy Menkes said it was like witnessing “a bird of paradise fluttering into a bricks-and-mortar London street.” By 2010, Williamson had started designing wallpapers and interiors, then furniture, and in 2016, 20 years after founding the company, he and Joseph wound it down and moved to Deià in Mallorca. “I’d fallen out of love with it. I just wasn’t that obsessive 20-year-old any more, waking up every day thinking about whether a floral worked, or if something was starched the right way.” He bumped into Nicole Farhi, who’d quit fashion for art, and she said to him, earnestly, “‘I can’t believe how much I used to care about a white shirt.’ And she looked at me like, ‘How ridiculous is that?’ I knew exactly what she meant. I’m not saying fashion’s a young guy’s game. But for me it was – I didn’t want to be competing with young people, and you know,” he grins, “still trying to be cool.”
So he started designing homewares (pieces from his current collection with John Lewis, like two glamorous palm-tree lamps, are scattered around his home) and then homes too, arriving at hotels and houses with his 20 questions, and an eye for colour, and a gentle air of curiosity. Sometimes he’s asked to rethink a whole house, other times a cupboard under the stairs. “I went to see an astrologer in Thailand a decade ago, and he said, ‘The hardest thing in your whole life is going to be learning how to say no.’” He loves it though, meeting new people, searching for furniture, fabrics, lights, pigments, “begging, borrowing and stealing” to meet a tight budget. His friend describes his design style as “sexy granny”, and, he admits, she has a point. He’s often labelled a maximalist – how does he feel about minimalism? “I love looking at those rooms – a bit of beige, one table and a lamp. Very nice, but I don’t understand them as homes. Everything has to have a little bit of a worn and torn quality. Especially with a kid!”
Skye is seven now – Williamson reveals that before our photographer arrived he was frantically tidying away her toys. In his book he offers, “not parenting advice but, rather, observations and personal learnings from the past seven years of being a father myself, while attempting to keep my interior design aspirations alive.” These learnings include: don’t build wall-to-wall storage systems, because their contents soon become obsolete. Keep kids’ wardrobes small, so “when one garment comes in, one has to leave”, and be mindful about what you buy – “Rather than restrictions, it’s all about editing and managing.” For today’s shoot, he says, he stuck the telly behind a sideboard.
And does the description of “maximalist” feel right? He hmms. “I often describe my style with these two words: ‘rustic decadence’. It sounds totally naff, I know. But they do seem to sort of… help. I’m drawn to opulence, and decadence and glamour. But I’m also drawn to quite rustic, earthy, crafty, humble things.” That also comes from his mum and dad. “We didn’t have any money. But my mum worked with what she could to make herself look glamorous, and she would do that in the home, too.” He talks reverently about the lamps they saved to buy, and how they stood just so in the living room. It was the same when he was starting out in fashion – working for Zandra Rhodes when he was graduating, it was Williamson’s job to sweep up the fallen pieces of lace from the dresses she was making. “And so by the end of the day, I had bags and bags of the stuff. So I zigzagged these patches of lace together to create a new lace. And then I made a dress from it.” He still likes that handmade feel. “That feeling of, ‘I haven’t got much, so let’s make something out of nothing, but something that’s…” he raises his head as he searches for the word, the not-pink walls reflecting gorgeously on his skin, “exquisite”.
Living Bright by Matthew Williamson is published on 7 September by Thames & Hudson at £30. Buy a copy for £26.40 at guardianbookshop.com
