Bafta’s deputy chair knows how to create a visually stunning home
Swapping the sidewalks of Brooklyn for the leafy streets of Wandsworth in south London might seem like an abrupt gear change. But for leading film and TV publicity and awards strategist Julie La’Bassiere, it made complete sense. Julie is British-born but moved to the US with her mother when she was a child and had been based there ever since. That was, until 2021, when she found herself living through a particularly ugly point in American history. “Between the Covid lockdowns, George Floyd and Trump, it was… a lot. I realised it was time to come home.”
Julie did consider other areas of London, but kept finding herself drawn back to the neighbourhood where she lived until the age of eight, which was where her grandparents had settled when they came to London as part of the Windrush generation in the 1960s. “My grandparents were incredibly special to me and I have many warm memories of being looked after by them when my mother was at work,” she remembers. When Julie was collected from school by her grandfather, a bonus was that he drove an old Bentley. “It must have been in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, 1977, because I took to sitting on the back seat and giving my classmates what I called my ‘royal wave’…”
Julie now lives in a flat that is a stone’s throw from both her primary school and her grandparents’ old house. “When you return to a place you knew as a child, where you felt happy and protected, it awakens some kind of muscle memory,” she says, “you immediately feel at home.”
It was important that the décor also felt instinctively right: “I wanted my home to be stylish but comfortable, colourful but not garish, and decorated with interesting things,” she says. “But most of all, I wanted it to feel like me.”
While so much about this Victorian flat felt familiar to Julie, there was the odd duff note. “The bathroom was a problem. It was small and a tricky shape and I knew I needed help to fix it,” she says. A friend of a friend said Julie should talk to interior designer Olivia Clasper, who runs Assembly Interiors. “That was the beginning of our interiors love affair,” she laughs. “She is a great listener and tuned into all the things that I love.”
Before work began, most of the walls of this flat were painted a uniform cold grey. Now, mellow paint shades set the mood, with a deep blue in the living room, a dark aubergine dimming the levels in the bedroom and a green-grey backdrop in the hallway. “When you list all the colours, they sound potentially overwhelming,” says Julie, “but visually it works, with smooth transitions from one space to the next.”
Rather more playful colours and vertical stripes are used in the kitchen, which takes inspiration from Mediterranean style, rocking terrazzo tiles and a cute café curtain. Then there’s Julie’s dressing room, which adds a blast of sunshine yellow, with just a sprinkling of powder-puff pink. “I love walking into this room every morning – it’s such a treat,” she says.
A tactile theme that runs through all the rooms is velvet, softening edges and adding sink-into comfort. “I would never want a home that’s too stylised, where guests don’t feel they can sit down and immediately relax,” Julie adds.
As a textural contrast to the soft furnishings, the entire chimney breast of the living room is clad in a shimmering wall of glazed tiles. “Initially, I wasn’t sure about the idea, but once the tiles were up, it looked stunning. So much so that I felt bad covering them up with a TV – but at least it is a design that displays an artwork instead of a blank screen when it’s turned off,” she smiles. Given Julie’s job, a TV was always going to be a must: alongside her role as chief strategy officer at DDA, a global communications agency that specialises in film, TV, brands and games, she is also deputy chair at Bafta.
While some of the luxe finishes in her home might whisper of the glamorous side of the film world Julie inhabits, there are also artworks, photographs and woven fabrics that resonate in personal ways. “It’s important for me to sit in my womanness, to sit in my Blackness and to sit in the fact that I work in film and entertainment – all of those things are part of my identity,” she says.
So two Frank Bowling prints hang over the sofa in the living room and a joyful photograph by civil rights photojournalist Gordon Parks greets Julie as she walks in the door. Art prints by French duo Sacrée Frangine liven up the kitchen-diner and photographs by Vikram Kushwah and Roasted Kweku add atmospheric images.
With colours, patterns and art that reflect facets of her personality, Julie’s home provides a calm refuge from her full-on work life. At the moment, the film world is gearing up for the Baftas in February and, naturally, Julie will be attending. Royal wave, optional.
