Why interior designer Sophie Ashby turns to art by Picasso and the Old Masters for inspiration
Her London-based Studio Ashby takes fewer than a dozen clients a year and creates art-inspired luxury interior designs for boutique hotels, private châteaux, a men’s fashion shop – and top-secret celebrity names
It could be argued that rising interior design star Sophie Ashby was destined for greatness. She studied art history at the UK’s University of Leeds and interior design at New York’s Parsons School of Design, and started her career with Victoria Fairfax Interiors before moving to creative agency Spring & Mercer. Both firms are design legends that offer emerging designers an enviable leg-up.
Ashby credits Fairfax with her “understanding of colour and sense of proportion”, as she told Sotheby’s ahead of the auction house’s Old Masters sale last autumn.
And she tips her hat to Spring & Mercer for affording her the space to find her own design voice and “interior style”.
“I think my style and approach is just a little bit different. People like youthful freshness and a new way of doing things. I’m collaborative and that’s common among all the designers of my generation,” she says about her specific interior style. “It’s very personal, a relationship with a client, and I want to enjoy it. And you can’t do that when you’re lording it over someone. That’s not me.”
That’s clear in Ashby’s own understated cool and easy approachability, evidenced in the mismatched grace and welcoming luxury of the Television Centre flat she designed for herself and her husband, fashion designer Charlie Casely-Hayford.
Ashby founded Studio Ashby in 2014 when she was 25. Despite the studio’s rapid emergence in interior design, she keeps her North Kensington office working on a quality rather than quantity model, only accepting fewer than a dozen projects each year. Ashby has made a name for herself by using contemporary art, masterpieces and photography as the foundation for each space, fitting them out with traditional and modern furnishings – bought and bespoke. And what has emerged as a hallmark of Ashby’s work is a marriage of art and home.
It’s very personal, a relationship with a client, and I want to enjoy it. And you can’t do that when you’re lording it over someone. That’s not me
Born in London to a South African mother and an English father, she moved around between the Western Cape and the UK, which gave her a keen sense of place. As she describes it, she learned “how unpacking all your stuff and your furniture and putting [it] in a space makes you connect with it. I’m fascinated by the power of stuff and the emotional connection to a place.” And it is those objects that serve as the jumping-off point for Ashby: she begins with a single pattern, colour or material in a piece of art and takes it from there.