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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Deep Dive, a podcast series in which Frederick's editor in chief, Dara Caponigro and fellow editors are joined by design industry leaders to share their unique insights, experiences and knowledge on the world of decorating.
- [00:16]
B
Hi, I'm Eugenia Soto, the design and decoration director for Frederick. I'm very excited to welcome today's Deep Dive guest, Rita Koenig. Rita wears many hats. Not only is she a renowned designer, she has a popular online workshop course with Create Academy and it's also somehow managed to design design an incredible collection of fabrics and wall coverings for Schumacher, which is launching later this year. So welcome Rita. Thank you so much for being on today.
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C
Hi Eugenia. So lovely to be here.
- [00:42]
B
Rita, your mother is of course the famous designer Nina Campbell. And you grew up in the trade. Is design just in your DNA? Have you always loved it?
- [00:51]
C
Yes, I think it has actually. I was, I had dinner with my mom last night and we were talking about various pictures and things in the house and it has always been something that's interested me and I think when I think back to when I was a child and decorating my bedroom and going shopping with her and, and also I used to play with her fabric books.
- [01:14]
B
Do you have any images of that childhood bedroom? I would love to see it. I bet it's so stylish.
- [01:18]
C
Oh my God. Yeah, there are loads. And actually my sister puts them up on Instagram sometimes. It was Ray chintz and, and fun. So. So my bedroom was absolutely the girly princess bedroom. And then there's another one from later on when I was a teenager which is all. It's got a half tester bed and this really pretty white. It actually was a CNC Milano linen on the walls and these bow fronted curtains which I think my peers bedrooms were covered in posters. Different. It wasn't your normal teenager's bedroom but I remember saying once to my mum, I just want it to look kind of like not done. And she was like, I don't understand what that means. It sounds like a nightmare. It didn't compute. So then it was always kind of properly decorated.
- [02:12]
B
But that is actually really interesting because your style is a bit undone. How did you learn that that was okay to kind of be confident and to do what you were doing and to do your own style of decorating? Because I think that takes a lot of courage and decorating to just be yourself and make these really bold choices.
- [02:29]
C
I think that it came from my surroundings really and the places that we went and I suppose it stems from it Decorating being something that interested me so much. And I loved looking at houses, and it has always really excited me. There were other decorists, like Victoria Weymouth. I remember going to her house and loving the way there was a lot of sort of vintage textiles, and it was this much more. More thrown together look. And I mean that in the most. That's the most reverent. You know, I love that. So it's not. And I suppose ours was very. The trim and the this and the that, and it all coordinated beautifully, which. There are parts of that that I really love. And I suppose it was the old houses that I went to, and my best friend, Honor, growing up, they lived in this beautiful castle in Scotland. And I remember Virginia showing us the rooms and the best guest bedroom that Virginia had just done called the River Room. And that was like, the most beautiful room in this castle, looked over the river. And I think I said something like, oh, my God, but it doesn't look like it's been decorated. And Virginia, laughing, became one of my favorite rooms. And of course, it didn't really look very decorated because to me, decorating was. Everything went together very nice. It was a different way of decorating, but these women really influenced me look. And I think it was probably quite tantalizing because it wasn't. It was a bit exotic because it wasn't what we had at home.
- [04:01]
B
So many of the rooms that appeal to me are the ones where personality shines through and you really get a sense of the person living there. I mean, you do that so well. And your former West Village apartment in New York, that was published by Domino. I think it was probably over 15 years ago, and then again, it was on the Selby, and it just launched, like, this whole new sensibility that was copied by so many people, and it's still really, like, all over Instagram and Pinterest. Well, I had. So I have a few questions about it. One is, if you could go back in time, is there anything that you would change?
- [04:33]
C
They were great, those departments. I think what I realized in both of them, of course, is that how you photograph things, things and how you live in things are so different because they. They were so photogenic, both. And the one on bank street was literally 400 square feet. It was so little. And I remember when I went to look around it, I was like, well, where's the bedroom? And she was like, this is the bedroom. I was like, but it. I don't think you can fit a bed in here. It's. So. This is more Like a cupboard, like.
- [04:58]
B
Welcome to New York real estate.
- [04:59]
C
I know, I know. It was like, I was quite early days that I. That happened. And I didn't know that yet. But the. I measured the width of the room and it was six and a half foot. And I was like, okay, I can get a bed. I can get the length of the bed in the width of the room, which made all the difference. So that was amazing. And that was. That picture of that bed underneath the window was so pretty. And of course the windows were really great because it was in an old brownstone on Bank Street. It was adorable. But I mean, it was quite tight living in such a small space, although they are well organized New York apartments. And then the same on west ninth Street. It was a bit bigger. But the thing with west ninth street is it didn't look out on anything. It had these enormous windows looking onto the backs of the apartments on Fifth Avenue. And one window had all these vines growing over it. And another window looked out onto somebody's roof terrace. So they put a plant in front of it and they all had grills. And so it was a bit like. I always thought it was a bit like living in a squash court. You didn't want to be there much in the daytime, you know, So I would have changed. I would have loved it if it had had. If it had had sunnier views, you know, maybe been a bit higher up. They taught me a lot, those flats, because those tiny bedrooms covered in, in wallpaper made them so cheerful and pretty. Just the sort of layouts of the sitting room. I always, when I lived in both of them, I used to sort of convince myself that I was really just sitting in the kind of little TV room of a house with many more rooms in it. But I was currently choosing to be in this one room. I think that it also taught me to let a room do one thing. I never had a dining room table in those rooms. You know, when you try and put a table that you can eat at in a small sitting room, it just becomes so cramped and unsatisfactory. It sort of taught me that. It taught me a few things and sat and they all had far places. They all had a lot of things that when I then moved back to England, I wanted. You know, when I moved back, I actually put my kitchen in my hall, which I'd never seen before. I'm not sure it's legal in this country, actually. You can't have a. You couldn't have the kitchen straight off a staircase. But when I moved back. I. I did. I did do that. I've just changed it. They were great little apartments, actually. They were very well appointed, small spaces.
- [07:23]
B
They were. And it sounds like they were kind of like lessons in. In a way. And just generally, I'm always really struck by. I mentioned this earlier, but just how confident and irreverent you are as a decorator. And you just, you know, kind of do as you feel and use materials and pieces in unexpected ways. I mean, I've, like, truly never met anyone that has style coming out of their fingertips as you do. Well, for those of you who don't know, Rita used to also do a column for Domino where you would go around to all these different cities and shop and just come back with the most amazing things and, like, the best spots always.
- [07:58]
C
That was really fun, that column.
- [07:59]
B
One of the things about that is that I always feel like you care more about style than provenance. And, you know, just whether you like something and it speaks to you. And so did you always have that? How did you learn that?
- [08:11]
C
I think for all of us, we have this sort of style DNA. We're all influenced by what we see growing up. And I see that with clients, too. There are some things that we hate because they were in houses growing up, or there are things that we love because they were in things growing up. And they can be things that other people think are really ugly. And I find it when I'm decorating. You have to, once you understand. But when people bring their own things to a project, you look at a thing in isolation and you're like, oh, God, do we really have to use that? And then when you find out about it from the client and you discover why they like it, and it's because it came from here and they suddenly you understand it, too, a bit like people. You know, not everybody's textbook beautiful, but once you know them, they are attractive. It's not just because they've got 8ft long legs and flaxen blonde hair and perfect nose. It's for many reasons. And I think things are like that, too. So that's part of what one gravitates to, I think, growing up. And you don't always know that that's the good one or the bad one, but the more you look at things, you discover the good one over the bad one. And I think it just sort of comes. And, of course, you build confidence that way. I watch my daughter putting makeup on and finding it so much fun and just endlessly putting on makeup. And I sort of feel delighted in it because I think by the time you're grown up, you're going to be so good at putting, wearing makeup because you'll have trialed and errored until it's right. And I'm terrified of putting makeup on because I just can't possibly do it. And so I don't. But I think it's, it's just that you just keep doing something you're interested in and you learn about it with ease.
- [10:02]
B
So you've grown up in the orbit of so many great designers. What's the best career advice you've ever received for someone in the industry or out of the industry?
- [10:10]
C
I suppose to begin with, knowing your worth. And I think when people are very young and starting out, they feel, they feel embarrassed to charge for it or that presenting bills or invoices and they feel like they should work for free and not do anything. And I remember my mother saying, if you don't send a bill, nobody will respect you. And I think that's very true. I think one shouldn't be afraid of billing, which sounds sort of mad now, but I think it, it was certainly true. You know, when you're starting out and you don't, you've never been paid before. So I think what her point was really, if you're afraid to talk about money, nobody, you can't be respected if you're afraid to talk about money. And the more you talk about money, the less frightening it is because if you talk about money early on, people have choices to say either I do want to spend that or I don't, or that's too expensive, let's look at, look for something different. Or I'm very happy with that. And you can get into all sorts of muddles if you don't talk about it all the time because suddenly you've overspent and you haven't said anything about it and it's got out of control. And that's where things can really go wrong.
- [11:24]
B
The design industry tends to be a very non transparent field, I think so as you say, like maybe the more you break it down for people, the better it is, or the more transparent you are with costs and spending and all that.
- [11:38]
C
I think it's really important to be transparent. And I think the other thing on the flip side of that is that what you think is expensive may not be what your client thinks is expensive. So just present the costs. If we think something's very expensive, we'll usually have something else up our sleeves to offer some alternative. But you also don't want to make somebody feel embarrassed about the fact that they're totally fine with spending whatever it is on something. So you have to be quite sort of, you know, neutral as well about the money. It's a funny line because you don't want to be spending somebody else's money for them. It needs to feel like it's their choice. And then it's a fun process. It should be a fun process. And I think you've got to let somebody else spend their money, enjoy spending it, and be really happy with the result, and spend within their comfort zones. I never want to make somebody feel like everything's out of somebody's budget. You hear people talk about that in property a lot. It really annoys me when somebody comes to the table with quite a sizable amount of money, and then the estate agent somehow would always make them feel like they haven't got quite enough.
- [12:52]
B
So you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but who or what are some of your greatest design influences?
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C
Yeah, so. Well, I suppose Robert Keim was a big influence. I love his style and. And how he decorated and he decorated with things, and that's what I really love. And he was extremely kind and generous to me. He very much sort of took me under his wing and. And often shared a lot with me, which I really enjoyed and I loved. Other ones, I suppose, are. John Fowler, I think, was a wonderful decorator. And again, you know, he is the sort of father of English decorating. But the rooms lasted a long time, and so they became softened with age and very comfortable. And I think that that's a bit lost now because people decorate so quickly. It's never given time to wear gently, which is a shame. And to collect, you know, it's the collecting of things that I suppose is really very English. That is the way of English decorating. It is.
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B
But I think that it's catching on in the States. I think it's. People are really enamored with English decorating right now. But going back to Robert Keim, when you say he decorated with things, what does that mean?
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C
He always sort of said that he was a really arranger of furniture. I think that was really the secret of his success is that for him, it was the. The furniture and then the stuff. He would just say it's just a bit of stuff, which meant fabric. So he would have all these barns full of antique textiles. But that was what gave his room such depth, was because he didn't just use what I call yardage. And I think that rooms can become very sort of two dimensional, you need something else as well. And that was, I think, what gave his rooms that edge was that he would upholster a whole chair and a whole load of kente cloths. Or he'd have come back from, you know, Uzbekistan with a whole load of amazing blankets. Or he had all of that, which added such texture, I think, to his rooms. Foreign.
- [15:12]
A
We're going to take a quick break to thank the sponsor of today's Show, Schumacher. Since 1889, the fifth generation family business has been the go to source for textiles, wallpapers and trims. Their insatiable passion for luxury, beauty and quality have produced designs that transcend time and rise above the ordinary. So head to Schumacher.com to check it out.
- [15:39]
B
Is there any design trick that you picked up in the US and that you use regularly in the UK that seems so American that this works and vice versa also? Anything that's like, so English, that was something that you introduced to your American clients and just works well, I suppose.
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C
Trays is something I've pinched from you guys. Way Americans always have trays everywhere. Corralling.
- [16:04]
B
We do love a tray.
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C
Very interesting things into very orderly arrangements and suddenly makes the most ordinary item feel important once it's in a little tray. So trays is definitely something I've brought back. And also painted floors. I love painted floors. And then I think that the thing we offer is upholstery. I think even though there are some amazing upholsterers, especially in New York, I think curtains. I feel like Americans don't really get into curtains that much, which is why going down American streets is so lovely at night, because you can see in all the houses look so warm and glowy. But the English, it's. Our houses are colder, you know, they're draftier, they're older and draftier. And so we do have heavier curtains.
- [16:53]
B
And do you ever do anything like, I don't know, install central air conditioning, for example, in. In England? Because that's obviously such an American thing.
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C
It's coming. More and more people do it sort of starting with people are putting in air conditioning just in the bedrooms.
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B
Do you have any new design obsessions?
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C
Well, I've just done my own place. I've put fabric all over the walls in most of the rooms, which I love. And also specialist painting. I've only recently started doing quite a lot of specialist painting, which I really love. We've just done a house where we did these beautiful lacquered walls on paneling. We paneled the walls and then we lacquered them. And then another room, we specialist painted it. Even though you'd barely notice the walls are just really gently sort of dragged and that it's cream paneling, but it's painted in three shades of cream, so you get the depth. So you don't walk in the room and think, oh, my God, this is such a beautifully specialist painted room. It just looks lovely, but it. It doesn't have the flatness that it has if it's just been painted in off white. But what the specialist painting really does is it. It gives it a strength. So because it's glazed, it just. It's much stronger than matte emulsion. So a staircase that gets a lot of traffic, you know, it's not long before they're scuffed. And it doesn't look very nice. So that's what I really like. It a. Gives a depth to the eye immediately. And also it just. It's stronger, which is really nice. But I love using small print wallpapers in big rooms at the moment is another thing that I'm really.
- [18:36]
B
What's the. The effect that it has? Like, is it that you walk in and you. It's a pattern, but it's not distinguishable.
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C
I think it does. There's two things. There's one paper that I've used in two places recently, it's an Internet poisson paper, and it's all over small floral print. And what it does on a big space is that obviously you can see this, although it's small, but it does give you that overall without it being such a great big, huge pattern. You see it sometimes in big old houses. There'll be libraries and things where the wallpaper is just a really small geometric or something like that I really like. And the other thing I love is using burlap on the walls.
- [19:21]
B
You designed some commercial spaces as well, notably the San Vicente bungalows in Los Angeles. But your design work tends to be so personal and collective feeling. How are you able to scale up for a bigger project like that and keep the essence of you and your decorating?
- [19:37]
C
Well, funny enough, doing San Vicente, which I. Which I loved, and working with Jeff Klein, who owns it and owns the Sunset Tower, was. Was really interesting. And it was also an amazing sort of entree into the hospitality industry. We treated the club side really like it was a house. Every room it, you know, had a big sitting room, library room, and the pool house and bars and things. So that. That's no different from working in a house where you have reception rooms and then the Bedrooms. We did. They were all different. And then for the hotel across the road, you know, you do sort of four designs, so was never overwhelming. And what did happen, though? There were things I wanted to do, and Jeff would be like, we can't do that, because it doesn't work in a hotel scenario. But what was so lovely about working with him? And he was the first one I had done, so I don't know what other people would like, but instead of just wanting to put in a roadblock and say, that's not possible, he would go, we can't do it for this reason, but let's find another way that we can. He always wanted to make it possible, and so we did. And I wanted to use beautiful fabrics. And he'd said in the beginning, we can just have anything you want copied on things. And I was like, we can't. I can't copy things. I want to. I can't design as well as these people, and I can't copy these designs. Is obviously, I'll be in huge amount of trouble. And they're my friend. We went to them, and I said, okay, Sally, I want to use your fabric. Can we. How do we do this? But we need to print it on kind of nylon, unfortunately. And it was really fun. You know, we found ways around how to do the things we wanted to do, and it was great. And. And for that, Jeff was really amazed. I mean, he was great. He was just great all the way through, and it was really fun working for him. And also the back and forth, which I love with clients, and he was like, really? Are you sure? And, you know, even when he doubted me, in the end, he'd be like, it's your design. If you really believe in it, we'll do it. And we did. And it worked really well. Everyone, we were all happy.
- [21:50]
B
I remember interviewing you a few years ago, and you were talking about how brown furniture was making a comeback. And this was probably like, six or seven years ago, and it really proved true. And I've censored a number of designers, reiterate that. What else do you think is poised for comeback or should be?
- [22:08]
C
I mean, the thing that always amuses me is I hear people saying, wallpaper's really making a comeback. And I'm like, feel like the wide mouth frog. Because I'm like, oh, well, never gone away. So I don't know. And I also feel like decorating is such a kind of long, slow burn. You know, when we decorate, we want these rooms to last for such a long time. I'VE started using braids a lot more than I have done before. And borders on curtains, which I really like. I love using felt. I don't know about everyone else, but anyway I like using it. There are also rooms like, I mean the pantry, the scullery. In terms of comebacks, I think ancillary rooms in houses have, have been making a big comeback recently. And the fact that there's a pantry on the COVID of Frederick, I think that sort of has just really caught on and influenced a lot of us. You know, a long time ago of course they were the rooms, there were all these rooms because houses had all these staff. But I think increasingly as we want to eat in our kitchens and do all of this, we also need those rooms where all the heavy lifting goes. It's not much fun eating in a room where there's piles of baking trays in the center sink while you're having dinner. And actually the ginormous kitchen with an island the size of Barbados in the middle of it doesn't give you much storage because kitchen storage needs walls. So when you start putting in these sculleries and pantries and things and larders, you get the walls you need to give you the storage so they become much more useful. And also they are interesting because your eye is led from one room to another which is always more interesting than just walking into one enormous room and seeing it all in the blink of an eye.
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B
One thing that I've seen a lot here is that open plan houses which were so popular in the States for so long are going away and it's like kind of a return to those smaller rooms that you're talking about. Last question, what's next for you? Do you have anything fun on the horizon?
- [24:14]
C
Well, I tell you what's really fun and really exciting is that I have just incorporated in in the state. So I am Rita Koenig Inc. Now which is terrifically exciting.
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B
Congratulations.
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C
Thank you so much. So we now have an American office and which currently is the kitchen island in, in Lara, my coo's kitchen in Miami. But yeah, we now have room to grow in the States. It's very exciting, really exciting for me because as you know, I love the States and I love working there and so yeah, so that's our latest piece of information. Eugenia, that's so great.
- [24:55]
B
Well, thank you so much, Rita. This is so fun. So many treasures in this conversation. I am glad I have a recording because there's things I personally want to write down.
- [25:04]
C
Well, Henya, thank you so much.
- [25:08]
A
Thanks for joining us today. Stay tuned for next week's episode of Deep Dive.