Tour Wow!house 2025, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour’s Transportive Decorator Showcase
The magic of Wow!house 2025 begins in the entrance courtyard. The verdant scene imagined by Adam Architecture welcomes guests into the Georgian town house façade, thus capturing the objective: Since 2022, Wow!house has dazzled Londoners with its transportive interiors, each of which pairs a Design Centre Chelsea Harbour showroom with a distinctive design talent. The fourth edition of this pop-up, labyrinthine show house is now on view through July 3, with proceeds benefitting United in Design, the nonprofit founded by local designers Sophie Ashby and Alex Dauley that champions equity in interior design.
The front entrance, for which garden designer Alexander Hoyle combined stone flooring and Artorius Faber paving with flora-filled baskets and pots, is one of several “outdoor” spaces that will have visitors forgetting they’re indoors. Another is Goddard Littlefair’s Andalusian-style courtyard bathed in sun-baked tones—the dome-topped pergola, hanging planter, and grasscloth wall covering evoke the Mediterranean, as do the powder-coated aluminum Crescent chairs from Perennials and Sutherland Furniture. Elsewhere, landscape architect Randle Siddeley enlivens his garden terrace with a stone fireplace nestled into a green wall. McKinnon and Harris’s Thirza Gotta sofa, lined with tufted cushions, add softer visual texture.
Opulence extravaganza
A smack of true opulence awaits in the entrance hall, wherein Victoria Davar of Maison Artefact installed floating Excel Stairs and reclaimed stone flooring from Lapicida. A hand-forged, patinated chandelier from Cox London cascades grandly from the skylight. Equally elegant is the Art Deco bathroom by Laura Hammett, who used Wow!house as an opportunity to “push the boundaries of our design aesthetic further than we can in our residential projects and embrace a more theatrical, expressive narrative.” The bathroom tap, designed in partnership with hardware specialist Samuel Heath, “was the catalyst for the entire scheme—a bold, sculptural piece that set the tone for the geometry, palette, and sense of indulgence that runs throughout the room,” says Hammett. The piece features a custom Vintage Bronze finish, “which feels beautifully lived in,” she adds. Topping it all off are decadent gold églomisé mirrors from Stuart Fox, confirming the bathroom as an “homage to the glamour and optimism of the 1920s,” says Hammett.
The drama continues in Peter Mikic’s dining room, where Benjamin Moore’s warm yellow Broadway Lights backdrops Billy Metcalfe’s multicolored abstract art and Ian Harper’s trompe l’oeil panels. Meanwhile, Nicola Harding’s petite powder room is an explosion of ruby, turquoise, and jade as taffeta silk tents the ceiling, woven dhurries swath the cabinet doors, and a double vanity from Drummonds stands proud.
London calling
British design, both rural and urban, is a clear touchstone throughout the show home. Calling to mind the English countryside is an ochre-tinted, Greco-Gothic kitchen by Rupert Cunningham and Leo Kary of Ben Pentreath Studio. The joinery matches the stone sink and upholstered Howard & Sons armchair, but the room’s real centerpiece is the solid oak prep table planted underneath an octagonal skylight. Emma Sims-Hilditch also elevates the courtyard room—a utilitarian mudroom—with a decidedly Cotswolds air. Marthe Armitage’s lush Blackberry wallpaper deftly mixes with hand-painted creations from Marlborough Tiles and a slew of antiques. And in Daniel Slowik’s chartreuse-hued morning room, conceived as a retreat for the late art collector Sir Richard Wallace, a George III bookcase and an early 19th-century Pontypool tray are just a few of the room’s quintessentially British bits and bobs.
When Dallas designer Chad Dorsey was called upon to create the Wow!house drawing room, he was intrigued but keenly aware of his American-ness in a predominantly British design world. This self-awareness “naturally drew me to the Arts and Crafts movement, which began in 19th-century Britain and later influenced American design,” he explains. Artisan details underpinned the design phenomenon, which was a direct response to the rise of industrialization. Dorsey followed suit in his room, assembling a custom rug by Kyle Bunting and Fromental’s Kiku wall covering—his own design that “features handcrafted panels with painterly chrysanthemum, sunflower, and lily motifs,” he says, “all precisely framed to feel innately architectural.”
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