Lucinda Chambers has, over the course of her illustrious career, developed such an intrinsic sense of style that she is able to pull off with enviable ease what may be deemed daring by others. Mixing colour, pattern and contrasting aesthetic elements comes naturally to her, and has been a signature of her work from her time at British Vogue, where she was fashion director from 1992-2017, to the present moment, at which she is a designer for womenswear label Colville, the co-founder of e-commerce platform Collagerie and a member of Inigo’s very own Guild.
Naturally, then, when it comes to curating the interiors of her family home in Shepherd’s Bush, Lucinda lets herself be led by instinct. Her decision to purchase the house in the early 1990s was itself somewhat spur-of-the-moment, triggered by her instant attraction to its lofty Edwardian proportions, abundance of natural light and seemingly endless back garden. Since then, while neighbours have gutted and extended their homes, Lucinda has contrastingly decided to firmly hold onto the “higgledy-piggledy” layout of her own. Her loyalty to its form, she says, is perhaps in a knee-jerk reaction to her childhood, during which her mother – who made her living renovating, then selling homes – relocated the family every 18 months, meaning that they were in “James Bond-y” pads one minute and heavily gilded Rococco-style flats the next.
Any decorative or structural tweaks that Lucinda has made to her home have, been in response to the ever-changing lifestyles of her three now grown-up sons – or, she admits when a room has got “really, really shabby”. But that’s not to say there’s a lack of vision here. Rather, Lucinda has taken each change within the life of her home to feed her “thorough obsession” with colour and pattern, embellishing its interiors with everything from patterned plates, to beloved paintings handed down from her mother. Below she takes Inigo through her intuitive design process.
