Two of the country’s top interior decorators share their distinctive outlooks with Paul Duncan
STEPHEN FALCKE
At Stephen Falcke Interior Design
I’m crazy about fabrics. I love old ones with new ones. I love colour. I’m crazy about colour and I’m crazy about no colour. I love colours that clash. I love a shocking pink and a red and an orange that bounce off each other. I love all different types of greens that work together. I love blues. I love mixing off-colours. I love colours that are dirty and murky, and then suddenly you put something clean amongst them and they come alive.
I always remember John Fowler saying that in a pretty flower arrangement, add some brown, and then the flowers will sing, they’ll come alive. I also love things that are totally white. I think you need a lot of guts to do a completely white interior. And then, on the other hand, you need no guts at all. It’s just a lack of colour.
At the moment, I’m living in a white house and I’m really enjoying it because I’m dealing with colour all day. To come home in the evening and to have a clean palette to start off with the next day is something I really do like.
I’m really a classicist at heart. But I like it with a twist. I like to look at things and give them their own personalities. I trained with David Hicks when I finished at Chelsea College of Art & Design in London and he was really the first to do neo-classicism in those days. He was doing old things in modern sycamore wood. I learned my kind of classicism, my sense of symmetry and my over-scaling and under-scaling of things from him.
I like to create focal points. I’d rather have one amazing flower arrangement in a room than a few in each (and, by the way, a room has taste if it can stand on its own without flowers). Walk into an entrance hall and just have one impactful arrangement. Some things I like layered and others I like to leave totally simple.
Once I was called into a house and they asked, “Could you finish it off?” I replied, “Actually, other than taking a lot of things out, there’s nothing I can do to it. It’s perfect as it is.” The client was expecting me to put more things in. But I love collections of things. A great collection will have great impact. The way you group things is important; I like groups of things together. I like repetition. And I like things that are busy as well as things that are totally understated. I think it’s all in the contrast. I like clutter when it’s controlled clutter. And I like something that actually just has nothing on it. I find the combination of a very plain black dress on a woman with an amazing brooch on the back of it terribly subtle. But boy, when she turns around, it’s so over the top. I kind of like that.
I love things that are handmade. I love things that are tactile. I love texture. I love African objects purely because they are all handmade and weathered and naïve. And I love the naïve mixed with the sophisticated. You know, my biggest inspiration is nature – things that are free, like the sun, water and fire. I’m interested in things that are organic. I love leaves, I love erosion, I love bones. And what’s nicer than contrast? What’s nicer than a wonderful old gilded chair upholstered in a straw cloth? And then place a very modern table next to it.
What about things that are too big in small spaces and too small in big spaces? I once worked with a very well-known New York architect. Where one would tend to put a big chandelier in a big room, he put a small one in a big room, breaking the rules most of us work by. But it worked brilliantly. Those eclectic mixtures turn me on.
But things also have to be functional. I think that when you sit down you must have a table nearby to put your drink down on. You have to have a proper light to read by. So I think that even though mood is important, and you have things that are lovely, in the end one has to say, does it work? And it actually has to work. And you have to make room for things to grow. Look at bookcases: you’re adding books all the time and you have to make room for your collection to grow. You might put objects in a bookcase, but be prepared to take them out and add books. Sometimes aspects of a project are ongoing – libraries, which I love, are one of them. You start a project and it never ends. I love things that never end.
I think that quality in an interior – of a piece of furniture or a good piece of art – is just so important. I just love furniture and I have a great love for chairs. A good piece of furniture, or art, whether contemporary or traditional, adds quality to a house in a way nothing else can. If you dissect an interior there has to be a balance in the ratio of upholstery to artwork to furniture. You might only have one piece of furniture, but that piece just has to be so good that it uplifts everything else. Often there’s so much upholstery that you can’t really have magic without that piece of furniture or artwork. You can’t. And that piece of furniture doesn’t have to be an antique. In fact, I encourage people to buy modern pieces. They can be modern classics. I like a form in a room to have a sculptural feel. If you choose a chair, let it have a discernable shape when standing on its own. If I put in a painting, it too must be able to stand on its own. If I do just a table down the middle of a room, it must be so strong that it literally is a good piece of sculpture. So everything must take on a sculptural form.
What is style? Style is how you walk and how you talk and how you live. It’s the way you group things. It’s the way you hang your pictures. But it’s not just about a room; it’s about the way you live in that room. Anyone can have a nice room, but a nice room is really a foil for you to live in that space. It’s the way you set your table. It’s the way you bake your bread. It’s about having a good pair of shoes, using shoe trees in them and putting them on with a shoe horn. Style is about taking something away. Style is... what you don’t put in. It’s about putting two things on, not lots. When I see someone with style, someone that’s well dressed, whether it’s a man or a woman, I think there’s nothing more exciting. I will stop them and say “fantastic, you are really, really great”. I love mixing something very expensive with something that’s kind of throw-away. Great style has got nothing to do with money. There’s no art to buying the most expensive things. Making the most of the least is what it’s all about. That’s the art. That’s what it’s about. Style is something that’s electric. It’s all about contrasts.
So it’s all about how you see things. And it’s all about how you live things, and how you live with them. It’s the most exciting thing to wake up and try and live your day in the most stylish way you can. But you do it for yourself. I don’t want to impress anyone, because it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the way you’re putting this stage together for the guys around you to perform on. If they do appreciate it, all the better. If they don’t, someone else will.
CATHERINE RAPHAELY
At Jack’s Camp, San Camp, Planet Baobab and Camp Kalahari, and at Francistown, all in Botswana, and Kleinefontein at Vermaaklikheid
I fell into the safari business because of a man. I’m a creative person who ended up running a business. I think that’s quite accurate. I wasn’t working as an interior designer. I’m not a professional. I couldn’t do a floor plan. But I ended up designing and styling all the lodges. That was the best and favourite part of my job but, sadly, it couldn’t be the most important. Operational requirements were a constant and noisy distraction. I was also culturally and professionally isolated as I lived and worked in a very small town on the border of Zimbabwe and Botswana for 17 years. I responded directly to the history and culture of the environments in which I worked.
I suppose I’m most known for the romantic post-colonial campaign safari-style of Jack’s and San Camp, and the funky afro-chic mud huts of Planet Baobab. The elements of my style – if you can call it that – are Dutch and British colonial with campaign furniture, African art and artefacts, anything related to natural history (skulls, taxidermy, ivory, tortoise shell, leather, textiles of all sorts), beadwork, embroidery, batik and more. The detail is authentic and my handwriting may be classic, but it won’t date because it’s been given a kick in the pants.
At Jack’s Camp in the Makgadikgadi Pan, one of the last proper tented camps in Africa, the context was my former partner Ralph Bousfield’s family’s past in colonial East Africa. Jack, Ralph’s father, had been a free spirit and a great white hunter in Kenya and Tanzania. The family had collected cultural artefacts and various curiosities relating to nature and the history of the areas in which they lived. We even have the three biggest hand axes in the world… I started by art directing what was in the store rooms, putting everything on display. Inspired by the colour of leather Bushman hunting aprons and capes and their beaded artefacts, I chose shades of rich burnt umber and sienna for the interiors. So nature and culture affected my choices and the style of the camp. I knew that it was very romantic and I knew that it was very evocative and I knew it would be commercial. It was actually a team effort; Ralph has taste and he’s got style. But you know, perhaps it wouldn’t look the way it does if it didn’t have that museum.
The context for Planet Baobab was the local village, which I found so inspiring, and the 17 giant baobabs right next to it. It was just so obvious to me the route I should take – in the same way that it was obvious to me what I should do at Jack’s Camp. You can’t put mud huts in the middle of the desert when that’s Ralph’s back-story. And you can’t put a colonial camp in the middle of 17 giant baobabs near a village. The style of our painted mud huts is derived from the free and exuberant creativity of that Kalanga vernacular architecture. I had help from the village women who painted all the huts: I would show them pictures to inspire them and they would always do it much better. James Torr, a surfer from South Africa, helped me build and we had an architect, Alwyn Petersen, who managed the camps and understood what I was trying to do better than a lot of other people. I wanted to make something beautiful. I would describe the styling as Congo-bungalow or sort of Lagos-Sheraton, but in a thatched-bar-in-the-middle-of-the-bush kind of way. It’s funky…. In the end, it’s very evocative and colourful, quite jungle and passionate, with this Brazilian feel. It’s got that chic sexiness to it.
The renovation and decoration of my home in Francistown was perhaps the project that was the most personal and expressive of my interests and tastes, at least at that particular moment in my life. The house had two beautiful and enormous syringa trees that shaded a large lawn with two kidney-shaped flower beds. It had a verandah and, inside, parquet floors. These key elements of African colonial style, combined with my love of the colour green, ’60s modernism and African art and artefacts, were my points of departure.
Kleinefontein, which sits on a river bank, has its own peculiar context, having been built in the 18th century as a hunting lodge for an official of the Dutch East India Company. The austere, but pure and earthy, elegant style of the architecture and furniture of the Cape Dutch colonial era is very striking. I was inspired by trade with the East Indies, which was also part of the back-story of the house. So I furnished it with Cape Dutch, English, Anglo-Indian and Ceylonese pieces to reflect the crossovers that would have occurred at the time. I have some 18th century bed hangings similar to those chintzes that the Indians made and exported to France and London. And I’ve included beadwork and the odd artefact from the Transkei. Kleinefontein is my favourite property. Maybe it’s a “Cape” thing – you know, the whiteness of the building’s walls, their thickness, the roughness of the plaster. It’s unique and romantic. There’s no electricity, so it’s just lanterns and candles, and I have chandeliers with candles in them.
Colour is always inspired by setting. For example, the burnt red of the earth combined with the dusty bottle greens of the acacias that you see during the wet season, along with the leather hunting aprons of the Bushmen, inspired the colours of Jack’s Camp. San Camp could never have been anything other than white. It’s an example of the true virtue of Minimalism. Perched on the shores of the world’s largest salt pan – virtually a salt sea – there are only four colours in the camp and the surrounding area: white pans and tents; golden grassland and straw matting; green canvas, trees and bush; and a big blue sky to frame it all. AA Gill dubbed it “God’s own Minimalism” when he visited. For me, it’s the ultimate in luxurious desolation. The bright pastel Botswana Blue that I saw used on all the government buildings and on local doorways was a natural choice for Planet Baobab. Not only was it traditional and authentic, it reflected the enormous blue skies of Botswana. It also combined so effectively with the red earth colours of the mud buildings. At Kleinefontein, I love the combination of the cobalt and teal blue of the river, and the dirty Rose’s lime juice green and oxidised golden colours of the succulent marshes that line its edge. That’s why I chose faded gold damask for the sofa there and combined it with antique blue kente cloth and archive re-editions of indigo-hued Indonesian batiks from GP&J Baker.
What makes me so happy is the way things look. I get pleasure from visual things. It can be a view, it can be food, it can be fashion, it can be interiors, it can be photography, it can be gardens. I like to create beauty around me, but I also appreciate what other people have created, or when it’s in nature. I guess I’m very aware of what’s going on, because I love magazines, films and music. And I think we’re probably all downloading influences and stimuli all the time.
* An edited extract from Style Icon by Paul Duncan (Random House Struik) Available at bookstores countrywide from October. - Sunday Independent