I was even more embarrassed.Įarth, Wind And Fire saxophonist Andrew Woolfolk dies at 71: Musician who worked on hit songs September and Boogie Wonderland had six-year illness We made it very stylish with screens painted in the style of the Spanish artist Salvador Dali's surrealist work, wonderful columns, low sofas, large lamps.Īndrey Guryev's enormous Moscow apartment – with its mile-long sofas and walls in the master suite covered in 500 metres of silk fringe – has got to be one of the weirdest jobs I've ever done.īut then, blow me, it won a prize for the best apartment in Russia and featured across several pages in a glossy magazine. I wanted to make it chic so I steered away from anything twiddly-widdly English housey-wousey. They had no furniture, but were buying paintings.
A few months later, she rang and asked me to do their London home. I met Abramovich's adorable wife Dasha at one of socialite Paris Hilton's parties in Los Angeles. You can't just say: 'Move that staircase three metres to the left because it is in the way of my dining room.' I find almost all oligarch-type yachts look the same, which gets rather boring. Bulkheads get in the way of the design and there are always limitations about what one can move around because, after all, the boat needs to be able to sail. We made vast over-lifesize statues of half-dressed Greek goddesses in fibreglass to withstand the brutally cold Moscow winter. One oligarch asked me to turn a huge outdoor terrace into a winter garden that he could use all year round. He asked me to do up his Moscow apartment Oleg Deripaska, the industrialist who once hosted George Osborne and Peter Mandelson on his vast yacht, was my first oligarch client. However monstrous Putin is, it should not be forgotten that so much Russian culture is wonderful – the art, the porcelain, the architecture and music. After Roman Abramovich bought Lucian Freud's enormous nude known as Big Sue for £17 million in 2008, I installed it in his London home. Russian taste is thought a byword for vulgarity, but the rich ones had a particularly keen eye for the best art. That said, one oligarch I worked with had a chef with about 18 boxes of knives and hired a security team to guard every door of his apartment. I expected these billionaires to have hundreds of minions, but I saw very few domestic staff. I always use a very good supplier in Paris. You can tell when a light switch is cheap by the feel of it. In particular, specified solid door handles, light switches and lighting fittings. They were after luxury rather than ostentation. The building should have been a hotel and is now valued at £300 million. Thank God, the job fell through, because I don't know what I would have done with it.
It was a beast, the largest non-royal home in London, with 104 bedrooms or something. Once, I was in the running to do up the gigantic mansion called Witanhurst in Highgate, North London, which had been bought by Russian billionaire Andrey Guryev through an offshore company. Looking back, though, one wrong move and I could have been in poisoned underpants territory. I had no idea that by associating with such powerful men, I was dancing along the edge of a volcano. But then he and my friend, the beautiful Alexandra Tolstoy, separated, and that was the end of that. When Roman Abramovich asked me to help design his house in London 's Belgravia, I put a great big plaster classical statue of a pipe player in the middle of the drawing roomĪn extraordinary scene – these women were apparently his court and they produced some disgusting sausagey food.
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