While I try to mask my shoe-box sized apartment’s bland white walls with a non-thematic array of street-fair purchased art, framed posters and photographs of my family and friends, I have often day-dreamed about owning a home (one day – in the distant future). These day-dreams involve thoughts of carefully planned-out interior decor – ranging from a modern living room with plush leather chairs and one painted red wall, an ornate Louis XVI-style bedroom, and children’s rooms with pastel-painted walls and matching white furniture.
As interior decorating is a multi-million (perhaps even billion) dollar-a-year industry with the well-to-do filling their luxury condos, apartments and mansions with everything from expensive furniture to priceless art and the highest quality wallpaper, carpet, rugs, etc. and stores like Home Goods and Target helping us “normal people” personalize our living quarters, one UK homeowner has taken on the task of decorating her home in a truly unique myriad of styles.
Artist Ann Frith’s Brighton, UK home is flamboyantly decorated with turquoise tiles on the kitchen floor, geometric wallpaper and a lemon-yellow stairwell. As if the bold decor itself wasn’t enough to look at, her walls are covered with the artist’s extensive collection of contemporary art.
“I’m really affected by colors, and spend a long time making them work together. Cold blues upset me.”
The homeowner’s living room contains a Mexican mask from Oaxaca, a giant bronze fish by artist Mike Chaikin and a tiger-print rug from Nepal, but that’s not all. The same room contains an oversized Iroko armchair covered in retro fabric, and the wallpaper, reminiscent of 1950s prints, is patterned with vertical lines.
Frith’s husband, Simon Arnold, is a furniture maker. He built the kitchen cabinets and painted them off-white to complement the kitchen’s Spanish mosaic tiles. Upstairs, a red Orla Kiely wallpaper lines the study, and one of the bedrooms is covered with a hummingbird-print wallpaper.
The couple find many of their eclectic pieces while traveling to places like India, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Japan, China and South America, but they also roam local secondhand shops for hidden treasures. Frith tries to buy one artwork per year, purchasing only pieces she “loves.”
Each year the homeowners open their house in May for the Brighton Festival, Artists Open Houses.
Wow… I’d love to see Frith’s creatively-decorated home. I’m sure you could spend as much time looking around in awe as you could browsing priceless paintings at the Met or Tate.
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