This Greg Natale-designed London home has the golden touch
When it came to transforming the four-storey London bolthole of financiers Laura Hui and her husband, Rob, into a family home, Greg Natale’s vision soon took shape.
He’d worked on their Sydney home 10 years previously, so he knew that this project was the perfect opportunity to blend British, European and Australian influences and create a cool, comfortable, four-bedroom, six-bathroom space – one imbued with the award-winning interior designer’s penchant for touches of high-octane glamour.
Based in Sydney, Natale established his eponymous design studio back in 2001. For Hui, ‘working with Greg is always such a great experience’, one that is ‘collaborative and creative’. Before he started, he made sure to ask all the family – including the couple’s two teenage daughters in the process – to submit Pinterest boards of what they were thinking in terms of mood, hue and finish.
While Natale was already familiar with their mutual modernist tastes, he also knew that he would need to find a way to balance Hui’s love for traditional touches and her husband’s ‘cleaner’ tastes with his own inimitable style. In the top half of the house, there are fresh, airy shades of pink, lavender and lilac, sky and teal blue, underlined with glimmering gold.
Natale countered this with a much ‘darker, moodier and more masculine’ media room, cellar and study in the basement. Pairing those ‘hyperfeminine colours’ with contemporary, not traditional, furniture (some curvy, some clean-lined, from Gubi and Minotti to Cassina) ‘created a good balance here’, he says.
Natale’s passion for layering bold, graphic patterns is inspired by the style of Gio Ponti and David Hicks, and it’s intrinsic to his design DNA. It also feels ‘nostalgic’ to him, reminding him of his ‘parents’ house, built in the late 70s – patterned tiles everywhere’, he says.
However, his recent work has become ‘more textural than high pattern’. Lively, veined marbles are used for the fireplaces and vanity units, the floors are marked out with his own collection of geometric tiles, the ceilings are trimmed in criss-cross beading and suede- like polished plaster is swathed across the walls of the cellar bathroom.
An earlier renovation had made the house open-plan and a little topsy-turvy, so Natale rearranged the floor plan. He put Rob’s ‘man cave’ in the basement and the kitchen was moved to the ground floor to capitalise on the skylight; a light-filled house was one of Hui’s priorities.
Natale converted two first- floor bedrooms into a generous main bedroom, bathroom and walk-through dressing room. In the living room, he reinstated cornicing, mouldings, panelling and a fireplace ripped out by earlier owners. Soothing arches were also added to ‘help define each space’, he says. ‘I know people like open-plan living, but it just felt soulless.’
A ‘knockout’ powder room – ‘one of our biggest indulgences; even the builders were like, “Wow, this is gorgeous,”’ laughs Hui – was also incorporated, along with a laundry room. And the combined kitchen, dining and sitting room is the ideal spot for relaxed entertaining, she says. ‘Guests can have a drink sitting at the table or on the sofas to the side, while I’m getting the canapés ready. That way, everyone feels part of the group.’
Boundaries were also pushed, but in a fun way – from the main bathroom’s ceiling, painted pink to match the marble bath, to the stairwell jazzed up with an ocelot-patterned carpet, Vistosi chandelier and balustrades in Tiffany Blue.
‘Greg said, “Please trust me, Laura”, and, of course, I love it,’ she says, beaming. The result is calm and flattering; it’s ‘a home that makes you feel good’, enthuses Natale. ‘But it is also definitely glamorous. With all those layers, we’ve put charm back into the house.’ gregnatale.com
