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“I’ve got to have some leopard in this room,” Tiffany Duggan’s client declared as they stood in the primary suite of her London home. Duggan, an interior designer and the owner of homewares company Trove, wasn’t phased by the request: Leopard is one of her go-tos. The carpeting in her studio is swathed in the animal print; it makes an appearance in her brand’s logo; and she sells chairs and pillows dressed up in the pattern. “My team and I are all up for leopard print,” says Duggan. And yet, she admits, “We were scratching our heads a little bit with this space.”
The dilemma: There was so much going on in the room—they had already picked out curtains sporting Beata Heuman’s Florentine flowers and painted the walls in Farrow & Ball’s Pond Green—that Duggan feared a splash of leopard would tip the scale toward too busy. But where’s the fun in playing it safe? They went for it anyway, bringing in a custom upholstered bench with matching bolsters. No regrets here: “It was actually nice to have something that throws the rest of the space off a bit,” the designer says. “Leopard does a good job at that.”
Taking a risk was their M.O. for the entire Sloane Square home’s redesign. “We wanted something that was different, but not for the sake of being different,” shares the homeowner. The checkered marble floors in the foyer, inspired by a trip she took to Majorca, are as classic (and functional) as it gets, but then the designer painted the baseboards and nearby stair railing in an unexpected green-gray from Farrow & Ball. In the breakfast nook, Duggan doubled down on the old-world glamour with a mirrored wall behind the table. (Fun fact: Those “antique” panels are actually new glass coated in a faux patinated finish.)
The narrow home’s five upper floors are choppy, consisting of a series of small rooms, landings, and stairs, so Duggan knew the design delights couldn’t come at the expense of practicality. In the cocooning green living room, what looks like a mirror is actually a television screen concealed behind reflective glass from a British company called Overmantels. “When we were talking about that room, my husband said, ‘Well, we totally need a TV.’ I said, ‘Do we?’” recalls the homeowner. They compromised on this disguise. “You can’t see it [when the TV is off],” she says.
Just a few steps down at garden level, the kitchen is easily the darkest room in the house. “My normal approach to somewhere that’s a little bit dark and gloomy is to embrace it; paint it dark. But that just wasn’t right for this room,” says the designer. The couple wanted it to feel brighter than it really was. So Duggan immediately painted every surface, from the new tongue-and-groove paneling to the low ceilings, the same shade of soft white; chose a Bianco Rhino marble void of distracting veining; and warmed up the floors with natural oak planks. She went hardware-less on the cabinets for the same reason. “We didn’t want any extra [visual] clutter,” she adds.
There’s yet another optical illusion on the attic level. In the smaller of the two guest suites, Duggan made it look like they built a twin bed into the nook of the window, but it’s really just a freestanding divan pushed up against the wall and framed by a valance and a layer of curtains. “The fabric matches both the headboard and the blinds,” she says. The only custom tweak she made was to fit the shape of the headboard to the sloped corner. “It feels really cool when you’re inside there, especially since you have a little window you can look out of,” adds the designer.
There’s less trickery going on in the larger space next door, but what the two spaces do have in common is the same blue-red color palette. Duggan simply inverted it—crimson is the power player here. “We wanted to make them feel like they went nicely together, a little bit like a really cute guest room in a hotel,” she says. There’s no animal print to be found, but gingham pillows and a floral quilt make this spot high above the bustling city streets feel more like a Cotswolds retreat.
