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Kelly Hoppen: ‘I always knew I would be successful. I believed in myself'
Charlotte Edwardes
Published at 12:01AM, March 19 2016
Kelly Hoppen is so finely attuned to her environment, “so instinctive” and so “sensitive to energy”, that she can tell if something is wrong “just by walking into a space”. A bad feeling, she explains, can give her the chills. And no, she doesn’t mean a non-aligned cushion, a blown lightbulb or dog hair on the sofa.
For those who don’t know, Hoppen is the interior designer responsible for the ubiquitous palette of infinite “greige”, muted neutrals with contrasting borders, piles of pebbles and wafting fronds in enormous vases. It’s the style of billionaires, of the Beckhams’ house in Los Angeles, and mimicked in every spa, mid-range hotel chain and how-to magazine spread. As Hoppen, who has been an interior designer for 40 years, puts it: “I’ve had a big impact on the way people live.”
In hotels she has had to change rooms “immediately” because of bad energy. (“You can use sage sticks — that’s what they used in ancient times to heal energy.”) At times it’s so bad that when she and her boyfriend, John Gardiner, a retired businessman, are going on holiday with Jo Malone, the perfumer, and her partner, “they [the men] wait downstairs with the bags until we’ve checked the hotel rooms because we’ve been known to move several times. It’s quite funny.”
For all this grappling with the intangible, Hoppen, 56, is remarkably grounded in the flesh; fit and flinty with an explosion of firecracker hair. When we meet she’s wearing black Chanel patent shoes, Simone Rocha fishnet ankle socks and a leather jacket.
When I arrive at Kelly Hoppen HQ in Hammersmith, west London, the staff all seem to have her spiralised hair: the girl at reception, the cheery PR who guides me up an iron staircase and into the cool, inner lair of Hoppen herself, the Medusa of all corkscrew hairdos, with a granite stare to boot.
She tells me about a new retrospective book (“40 years! It feels like yesterday”); a new furniture range (“100 pieces out in April”); and her “affordable line” website, which she monitors every day because she’s “fascinated” by what the plebs are buying (“it’s interesting that I get it wrong sometimes”).
She has just signed off a new wallpaper collection. Then there’s a new hair product range, more jewellery (“first line sold out in an hour and a half”), there’s baths and taps, paints . . .
She has developed her public profile too, presented her own interiors show on Channel 5 and appeared as a judge on Dragon’s Den (for two series; she left last year). She was “over the moon” to be asked to be in the new Absolutely Fabulous film, which comes out in the spring.
“I’ve got a role, I’ve got a speaking part, but I’m not giving anything away,” she says. Although, obviously, “my name has been in it before”. She “distinctly” remembers the day her name was first used as an adjective — as in “That’s very Kelly Hoppen”. “It was weird.”
On her desk — a place of tone and symmetry — are the 12 projects she’s finishing. She does about 50 a year. They range from £20 million to £30 million, “down to a million. It depends. Sometimes even half a million.” There are tower blocks in Taiwan, yachts, interiors of private planes, five-storey houses in London, a house in New Zealand — “we work globally”. She ships the entire interior contents from this office, she says, flicking a hand towards the shelves of vases and cushions and odd-shaped ornaments.
Wow. It must be hard to keep up. “I’m a typical Leo,” she says. “I hate to be bored, and I like new interesting things.”
In the past she has called herself Miss Control Freak too. “I’m so misrepresented,” she says with a bored sigh. “The control freak thing is a joke. I’m a perfectionist. And I don’t have to work,” she adds. “I do because I love it.”
Nor is she a crazed workaholic. “I love my sleep,” she says. “I’m in bed at 9.30 most nights with a box set. I can’t go out more than two nights. I’m up every morning at the crack of dawn. I go to the gym. You see? I am human. Very human, trust me.”
Most socialising she does at home, over dinner. She loves a dinner party. She doesn’t drink much. “I don’t like the taste of alcohol unless there’s something to take the taste away. I will have either straight vodka or vodka, lemon and crushed ice. I do like being a bit drunk — everyone always says I’m very funny when I’m drunk.”
She works only with those who share her vision and not “every Tom, Dick and Harry”, she says. “We turn a lot of work down.”
Nor does she spare clients’ feelings if she feels they have bad taste. “I’m not gentle at all in that respect. If they say something that I don’t think will work, then I’ll be honest and say why.”
I suspect that under the armour-plated abs is a softer Hoppen. Her fascination with “home” and need to build and create perfection at “home” would no doubt feed some frenzied scribbling on a psychologist’s notepad. Her father was in the clothing business, her mother an antiquarian bookseller turned decorative arts specialist.
The first room Hoppen designed was her own bedroom, at the age of 12. “It had white shag-pile carpet, brown felt walls trimmed in chrome. It had white shutters and a really cool chrome chair. It was kind of trendy, and very modern for such a young girl.”
Even then, she was aware. “I always knew I was going to be successful, I just knew. But that’s not just from being big-headed, it’s because I believed in myself.”
The key is her ability to read people. “That’s my magic, what I was born with. When you’re doing up someone’s home it’s very personal. So you’re a bit of a psychologist trying to get them to compromise. I am very intuitive and my instincts are never wrong.”
Never? “No, absolutely hands up my instincts are never, ever wrong.”
Does she ever have self-doubt? “Soz, no.”
She has said her father Seymour’s death at the age of 48 (when she was 16) made her fearless, but she also says that the whole family are “grafters”. “My mother says I’ve always had it. The way I would talk as a kid — I can do this, I will do this, I will be successful in it.”
Famously, she claims to have invented “East-meets-West”. She “owns” this style, she says. “It was a phenomenon that no one had really looked at,” she declares, somewhat disingenuously. “I have a real affinity with the East, it does something to my soul. When I was starting out at 17 my style was already prevalent. And I always owned that.” Hoppen uses the shamanic practice of Vastu, a traditional Hindu set of architectural and design principles that is said to attract positive energy.
I ask about the red wool bracelet on her left wrist. “It’s a blessing,” she says. What kind she won’t say. Is it kabbalah-ish? “No.”
Charlotte Edwardes
Published at 12:01AM, March 19 2016
Kelly Hoppen is so finely attuned to her environment, “so instinctive” and so “sensitive to energy”, that she can tell if something is wrong “just by walking into a space”. A bad feeling, she explains, can give her the chills. And no, she doesn’t mean a non-aligned cushion, a blown lightbulb or dog hair on the sofa.
For those who don’t know, Hoppen is the interior designer responsible for the ubiquitous palette of infinite “greige”, muted neutrals with contrasting borders, piles of pebbles and wafting fronds in enormous vases. It’s the style of billionaires, of the Beckhams’ house in Los Angeles, and mimicked in every spa, mid-range hotel chain and how-to magazine spread. As Hoppen, who has been an interior designer for 40 years, puts it: “I’ve had a big impact on the way people live.”
In hotels she has had to change rooms “immediately” because of bad energy. (“You can use sage sticks — that’s what they used in ancient times to heal energy.”) At times it’s so bad that when she and her boyfriend, John Gardiner, a retired businessman, are going on holiday with Jo Malone, the perfumer, and her partner, “they [the men] wait downstairs with the bags until we’ve checked the hotel rooms because we’ve been known to move several times. It’s quite funny.”
For all this grappling with the intangible, Hoppen, 56, is remarkably grounded in the flesh; fit and flinty with an explosion of firecracker hair. When we meet she’s wearing black Chanel patent shoes, Simone Rocha fishnet ankle socks and a leather jacket.
When I arrive at Kelly Hoppen HQ in Hammersmith, west London, the staff all seem to have her spiralised hair: the girl at reception, the cheery PR who guides me up an iron staircase and into the cool, inner lair of Hoppen herself, the Medusa of all corkscrew hairdos, with a granite stare to boot.
She tells me about a new retrospective book (“40 years! It feels like yesterday”); a new furniture range (“100 pieces out in April”); and her “affordable line” website, which she monitors every day because she’s “fascinated” by what the plebs are buying (“it’s interesting that I get it wrong sometimes”).
She has just signed off a new wallpaper collection. Then there’s a new hair product range, more jewellery (“first line sold out in an hour and a half”), there’s baths and taps, paints . . .
She has developed her public profile too, presented her own interiors show on Channel 5 and appeared as a judge on Dragon’s Den (for two series; she left last year). She was “over the moon” to be asked to be in the new Absolutely Fabulous film, which comes out in the spring.
“I’ve got a role, I’ve got a speaking part, but I’m not giving anything away,” she says. Although, obviously, “my name has been in it before”. She “distinctly” remembers the day her name was first used as an adjective — as in “That’s very Kelly Hoppen”. “It was weird.”
On her desk — a place of tone and symmetry — are the 12 projects she’s finishing. She does about 50 a year. They range from £20 million to £30 million, “down to a million. It depends. Sometimes even half a million.” There are tower blocks in Taiwan, yachts, interiors of private planes, five-storey houses in London, a house in New Zealand — “we work globally”. She ships the entire interior contents from this office, she says, flicking a hand towards the shelves of vases and cushions and odd-shaped ornaments.
Wow. It must be hard to keep up. “I’m a typical Leo,” she says. “I hate to be bored, and I like new interesting things.”
In the past she has called herself Miss Control Freak too. “I’m so misrepresented,” she says with a bored sigh. “The control freak thing is a joke. I’m a perfectionist. And I don’t have to work,” she adds. “I do because I love it.”
Nor is she a crazed workaholic. “I love my sleep,” she says. “I’m in bed at 9.30 most nights with a box set. I can’t go out more than two nights. I’m up every morning at the crack of dawn. I go to the gym. You see? I am human. Very human, trust me.”
Most socialising she does at home, over dinner. She loves a dinner party. She doesn’t drink much. “I don’t like the taste of alcohol unless there’s something to take the taste away. I will have either straight vodka or vodka, lemon and crushed ice. I do like being a bit drunk — everyone always says I’m very funny when I’m drunk.”
She works only with those who share her vision and not “every Tom, Dick and Harry”, she says. “We turn a lot of work down.”
Nor does she spare clients’ feelings if she feels they have bad taste. “I’m not gentle at all in that respect. If they say something that I don’t think will work, then I’ll be honest and say why.”
I suspect that under the armour-plated abs is a softer Hoppen. Her fascination with “home” and need to build and create perfection at “home” would no doubt feed some frenzied scribbling on a psychologist’s notepad. Her father was in the clothing business, her mother an antiquarian bookseller turned decorative arts specialist.
The first room Hoppen designed was her own bedroom, at the age of 12. “It had white shag-pile carpet, brown felt walls trimmed in chrome. It had white shutters and a really cool chrome chair. It was kind of trendy, and very modern for such a young girl.”
Even then, she was aware. “I always knew I was going to be successful, I just knew. But that’s not just from being big-headed, it’s because I believed in myself.”
The key is her ability to read people. “That’s my magic, what I was born with. When you’re doing up someone’s home it’s very personal. So you’re a bit of a psychologist trying to get them to compromise. I am very intuitive and my instincts are never wrong.”
Never? “No, absolutely hands up my instincts are never, ever wrong.”
Does she ever have self-doubt? “Soz, no.”
She has said her father Seymour’s death at the age of 48 (when she was 16) made her fearless, but she also says that the whole family are “grafters”. “My mother says I’ve always had it. The way I would talk as a kid — I can do this, I will do this, I will be successful in it.”
Famously, she claims to have invented “East-meets-West”. She “owns” this style, she says. “It was a phenomenon that no one had really looked at,” she declares, somewhat disingenuously. “I have a real affinity with the East, it does something to my soul. When I was starting out at 17 my style was already prevalent. And I always owned that.” Hoppen uses the shamanic practice of Vastu, a traditional Hindu set of architectural and design principles that is said to attract positive energy.
I ask about the red wool bracelet on her left wrist. “It’s a blessing,” she says. What kind she won’t say. Is it kabbalah-ish? “No.”
