Kathryn M Ireland, where English country house meets Spanish Colonial

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When it comes to decorating a house, Kathryn M Ireland believes you have to trust your instincts — which is something a lot of people find hard do, she says. “I hate conformity and matchy-matchy decorating to make a house look like it’s the inside of a hotel. For me, your house has to be surrounded by things that mean something and in colours that make you happy,” says Ireland.

The British-born interior and textile designer is known for her mix of English country-house style crossed with the laid-back Californian air of her adopted home. She has worked for clients including the actors Steve Martin, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and the playwright David Mamet.

She is speaking to me on Zoom from her home in Santa Monica, turning her computer around to show me the light-filled room in her Spanish-style bungalow. It is apparently a “bit of a mismatch”, she says, with a red couch she has had for 30 years (“one should buy furniture for a lifetime”), a Balinese day bed that serves as a coffee table, a large tapestry as well as a Damien Hirst on the wall. To me, it looks perfectly pulled together.

Ireland’s current home is the first of 20 houses in her new book A Life in Design, which features several of her own properties, including a 1923 Spanish Colonial-style property in Santa Monica she bought with her then husband, the filmmaker Gary Weis, and where she raised her three boys. There is also the French farmhouse that she bought on her honeymoon and where she recently spent a month with her first granddaughter, “telling her tales of what her dad used to do here as a boy”.

Then there is the “gap year” house in Venice, California, purchased after selling the family home (being opposite the beach, she took up paddleboarding and surfing “just to impress the boys”), a ranch in the Ojai Valley, near Los Angeles, that she restored and her London home on Gloucester Road, near Kensington Gardens, the park where she used to play with school friends.

Growing up in England, an early interior influence was Ireland’s mother Lillian, who, as the daughter of an ambassador, had been brought up in Egypt and returned regularly, bringing home suitcases full of brightly coloured silk to whizz up into new furnishings. Another was “Nico” — Nicolette Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the Marchioness of Londonderry— whose Knightsbridge home, decorated with objects from India and Morocco, she played in as a child. “Nico used colour like no one else, she was a real genius. I was very enamoured by her style and taste.”

With a secret desire to be Bette Davis, Ireland moved to Los Angeles in 1986. She met and married Weis within a few months, and they had their three boys — Oscar, Otis and Louis — within four years. Their family home was decorated on a shoestring: “We put all our money into purchasing it,” she says, but it shows her evident knack for styling.

Admiring her natural style, her friend Steve Martin asked her to find and decorate a new home for him — a farmhouse in Beverly Hills that is also featured in the book, a pale-walled, low-beamed property that Ireland filled with antiques and rich vintage fabrics. The project launched her career with a number of Hollywood clients.

The book isn’t arranged chronologically; rather, it moves from east to west coast, America to Europe, over 30 years. But the projects have a continuity to them. “I don’t think the early ones look dated,” Ireland says, “because my style is largely the same. I have evolved, of course, but it’s been gradual.” Which, she says, is exactly how one should decorate. “You don’t need to decorate your house all in one go — it can take a lifetime.” 

‘A Life in Design: Celebrating 30 Years of Interiors’ by Kathryn M Ireland, CICO Books

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