My design London: Geffrye Museum director Sonia Solicari guide to the best of the city’s architecture, design, homeware shops and secret spaces
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With the help of a £12.3 million grant from the National Lottery Fund, Sonia Solicari is launching Unlocking the Geffrye, a project that will double the floorspace of Shoreditch’s Geffrye Museum of the Home, which explores home life since the 17th century.
Solicari joined the Geffrye as director in January from her previous post as head of Guildhall Art Gallery in the City.
She has also worked at the V&A Museum as curator of ceramics and glass and assistant curator of paintings.
WHERE I LIVE
I live in Crystal Palace and with the Overground it’s a dream of a commute to work. I live right on the top of the hill with glorious views over London.
It’s an Edwardian two-up, two-down house on one of those really vertiginous streets.
What’s so impressive about the area is the number of independent shops it has maintained.
MY DECOR
I’ve pretty much decked out my house from Crystal Palace Antiques and Modern because I’m really into that Victorian/Edwardian brown furniture which is out of fashion, so it’s very cheap at the moment.
I’ve gone for velvets — the look is neo-Victorian — deep greens and some dark colours.
GREEN SPACE
Crystal Palace Park is wonderful, with the melancholy remains of the original Crystal Palace, the Victorian dinosaurs and the National Sports Centre, a great modernist Grade II-listed building designed by London County Council architects and built in the early Sixties.
HOMEWARE SHOPS
I go to The Do South Shop in Crystal Palace for contemporary pieces. I don’t want my house to be a complete Victorian pastiche. House of Hackney is great for fabrics and wallpaper.
They call themselves “the new maximalism” which is how I’d describe my house. And Liberty, of course.
I also collect Paul Bommer the print maker who is very much inspired by the 18th and 19th centuries and fun London folklore.
He sells through Big Cartel online but occasionally takes residence in one of the Huguenot houses in Spitalfields and has a selling exhibition.
FAVOURITE MAKERS
Louisa Taylor has a studio in Forest Hill and creates really delicate, beautiful colours inspired by 18th-century tableware, but they’re also incredibly modern.
She sells through the Contemporary Ceramics Centre in Great Russell Street, a favourite haunt. I also buy from Contemporary Applied Arts in Southwark Street and the Geffrye’s annual Ceramics in the City (part of the London Design Festival, September 21-24).
I find that contemporary ceramics work very well in historic interiors.
AMAZING ARCHITECTURE
The exterior of the Grange Langham Court Hotel in Langham Street, W1. It was built as a nursing home in 1901 so it’s got that black-and-white tiling.
It’s a wash-downable, practical building for the centre of London, but so elegant and unexpected. More like something you’d expect to find in Vienna.
SECRET SHOP
This Shop Rocks (131 Brick Lane; 020 7739 7667), which sells antiques and bric-a-brac like Victorian scrap screens, is good for a rummage, and Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden is great for imaginative, theatrical gifts. I have their hand-cut wooden toy theatre figures dotted all around my house.
CULTURAL HOTSPOT
I have to say Hoxton. The extension of the Geffrye really will regenerate Kingsland Road. We’re digging down into the basement spaces underneath the East Wing and creating a new long gallery which will look at the concept of home, and the stories we tell about it.
We’re adding a first-floor library, learning pavilion and studio. There’ll be a big new entrance hub opposite Hoxton Overground station and a new café in the former Marquis of Lansdowne pub on the corner. The architects are Wright & Wright who worked on Lambeth Palace.
FAVOURITE GALLERY
The Queen’s House, Greenwich for the strange and wonderful maritime paintings.
And Victoria Miro always has inspiring shows and a lovely, tranquil garden.
What really got me into neo-Victorianism as a design style was the show Grayson Perry did there, The Charms of Lincolnshire, where he put Victorian artefacts into a contemporary setting.
MOST COVETED OBJECT
To show how forward-thinking the Victorians were, it’s got to be an EW Godwin black Japanese table with the cross legs.
And I’d love some Thirties/Forties vintage Chinoiserie wallpaper. Cole & Son do one called Gondola.