| Anouska Hempel takes no prisoners. From the moment she opens the door to her London townhouse on a smart tree-lined street just off Hyde Park, I am under no illusions as to who is running the show. She is courteous of course, but there are a million other things she could and should be dealing with, so it is an interview taken at a sprint rather than a gentle jog. Questions she dislikes are answered with expressively rolling eyes, but her responses are refreshingly honest and direct — she has never had much truck with sanitized PR soft-soap.
The fact is I am far too excited to be in the home of Hempel to notice that her famously volcanic temper could erupt at any moment. This woman is a legend, for goodness sake. Not only is she an ex Bond girl (reference to which produces the fabulous roll of those huge green eyes), but she is also the founder of arguably the first-ever boutique hotel, Blakes, in the early 1980s; friend and confidante of iconic figures such as Tom Ford, Bob Dylan, David Beckham, Robert de Niro, Elle Macpherson, Halle Berry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mickey Rourke, Jean Paul Gaultier, Christian Lacroix, Helena Christensen, Eva Longoria, Uma Thurman and many, many others; an interior designer, couture designer, landscape gardener, mother of six and a Lady to boot (married to the financier Sir Mark Weinberg for nearly 30 years).
She is also rightly famous for a signature-style décor that first brought East and West together into perfect harmony: monochrome palette, Japanese-style shutters, unpretentious linens, dark floors, moody lighting, and objects and artwork gathered from travels in the Orient. When she first opened Blakes, a lack of space and budget forced her to place all the attention onto the beds themselves, so she single-handedly reinvented the four-poster, with imaginative combinations of slatted screens, draped fabrics, dark woods, twisted metals and exotic mother-of-pearl. Says Hempel, “I thought guests should have a beautiful bed above all else — a patch of magic to call their own.”
Those beds remain a core ingredient of her strong, confident and extrovert style: rooms within rooms that speak of mystery and intimacy. They are also a way of keeping alive the use of traditional craft skills, which she champions. “I can’t buy everything off the shelf — it’s important to me to commission bespoke objects of beauty, such as beds,” she says. “I have artists and craftspeople all over Britain, whom I have trained to do things my way. Every six months there is something glorious for them to make, and my clients will wait another six months for that to happen because they know they will have something really extraordinary.”
Her house does not disappoint. It is almost like being in some fabulous nightclub at ten in the morning. When I use the word “theatrical,” however, I get a well-deserved slap on the wrist: “I don’t even know what the word means actually, because this is it. I don’t know how to do anything else. It is just how it comes naturally,” she scolds.
Hempel is of Russian-German descent but was brought up in New Zealand, where the family farmed sheep. This is probably one of the most unexpected facts in her extraordinary life, as it seems that nobody could be less like a farmer’s daughter than she. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she left as soon as she could, arriving in London where she made a living selling antiques at the famous Portobello Road market. “I could hop along and buy something for £3, make my stall look absolutely beautiful, and then sell it for £300 if I was clever enough,” she recalls. “I had that basic instinct for trading, which is probably why I love business as well as design.”
Beautiful and clever, she soon attracted a bohemian crowd of actors, artists, musicians, fashionistas and other creatives. It was from these friends that Hempel’s idea for Blakes was born. “Everyone kept saying there was nowhere to stay in London. It was either grand, expensive places like the Dorchester or flea-bitten B&Bs in Earl’s Court,” she explains. “At the time, the government was giving grants for new bathrooms if you renovated buildings, so when I fell over this funny place in Roland Gardens, I decided to open a hotel. That was in 1979. I was the cook, the housekeeper, the lot — it was all very cheap and cheerful, but somehow common sense and design flair took me through.” She adds, “It has been copied absolutely everywhere, so I must have gotten something right.”
Although Hempel sold Blakes a few years ago, she has always had a hand in its management. And just recently she bought it back and is firmly back in the driver’s seat. A major renovation is currently underway, both of the 52 bedrooms and the public areas. “People think of it as ‘dear old Blakes,’ but soon it will be ‘brilliant Blakes,’ ” she laughs. Hempel also has plans to roll out the concept in Paris and is exploring opportunities in Istanbul and Cairo.
Hempel had already branched out in a modest way from antiques to interiors before becoming a hotelier, but over successive years the interior design business has grown hugely as more and more people request the Hempel look in both homes and commercial projects. Today there are about 40 people employed in the design studio, working on hotels, restaurants, offices, yachts and private residences around the world. Hempel is currently designing four landmark hotel projects around the world: The Grand Theatre (Beirut, opening 2013), The Sacoor Hotel (Lisbon, opening 2012), The Dutch Bay Resort (Sri Lanka, opening 2012) and The Inverness Terrace Hotel (London, opening 2012). She is also the latest high-profile designer to announce a collaboration with the international design and branding company yoo, whose other star designers include Philippe Starck, Kelly Hoppen, Marcel Wanders and Jade Jagger.
There is also a landscape architecture arm to the business, a natural progression given the fact that she herself is passionate about gardening. Now global licensing deals are taking the Anouska Hempel name into thousands more homes — admirers can buy anything from cutlery to flatware, glasses to garden furniture, linens to beds, wallpaper to lighting.
[Of course something had to give and in Hempel’s case it was the haute couture house that also carried her name from the mid-80s to recently. Although she loved designing the glorious embroidered bustiers and romantic hooded fur-lined cloaks that seemed to step out of the pages of Dr. Zhivago, the demands of being a hotelier and international designer mean that there were never enough hours in the day to do it justice. “It was easy for me to design clothes and I loved doing it. I am structured so my collections were structured – crossing over from interior fabrics to couture seemed natural at the time.”] CUT
How this self-confessed workaholic has also juggled the demands of an A-list husband, six children and several homes is beyond imagination, but she does everything she does because it what she loves. “I have very good people helping me, but there are times I do get quite lost in my own life. If I am doing something, I will work until 3 in the morning. My husband thinks I am crazy, but I do like looking after people and that is what I do both in the hotel and in design: put the building up; put the person in; dress the person; feed the person; create a total lifestyle for him or her. I want people to have a good time and to come back again because they have enjoyed the best service I can provide. I love it all.”
anouskahempeldesign.com
blakeshotels.com
yoo.com
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