Inside Gaby Dellal’s Enchanting Georgian Home in London

I live in the middle of East London in a Georgian house. As a filmmaker, my take is quite stylized. I'm not the director that employs a production designer and says, I usually give them, say, oh, use my sofa. Let's take the sofa out, or use my sofa. Every film I've made has a lot of my own stuff in it. I'm lucky enough to have been brought up in nice environments. Probably my mother had very good taste. And I think that rubs off on your children. You either reject it, but you always, in the end, become your mother. So I like making really nice tables. So I spend hours changing plates up or putting my flowers nicely. I'm a foodie. So is my elder son. And I cook a lot. And so I figured that what we could do is create a business, me and my son Jake. And we do very specific bespoke kitchens, which is called Create Studio London. There has to be a lightness to the kitchen, because we spend so much time in it. I'm very tactile. So there's a lot of wood elements in here. There's wood. There's a copper sink. There's an old marble work surface. This is an old kitchen farm table that I bought online. I then spent ages trying to find these old caster wheels so that it elevates the island. And I added a shelf at the bottom. And this is pretty beautiful, because there are drawers that go all the way through to the other side. I've got a very old-fashioned fridge, which I've had for years and years. It belongs to my partner. It's his prized possession. It barely works. It makes a really loud noise. We've hidden the extractor, because I don't like the look of them. And then I'm a great advocate of mirror splash bags. People never really warm to those. But actually, they're very durable and easy to clean. And they double the size of the room. My favorite thing of everyone that comes into this kitchen is the Zelige green and earthenware tiles. And they're particularly nice. I love a thick blanket on an old curtain rod. I'm mad about Hungarian linen. And I go sometimes to the Vienna market at Christmas. In my kitchen design, you cannot have a dining room and then a kitchen with a kitchen table in it, because then you never use the dining room. So I made a big point of not having a kitchen table in there. When I had this room to decorate, this blue picture by Gary Simmons, which is eight panels of the New York Expo, so I brought it here. And it was really interesting, because the panels didn't really fit. But because there's a slightly curved wall, I hung it in what I think is a really beautiful way. So that then dictated the color in this room. Got these really beautiful mid-century Danish chairs made out of bent plywood. This is Guy Tilley, my boy in South Africa, which is a beautiful photograph. Got these specially designed for the house tiles, which were designed before my time. And the brown in them informed all the brown mahogany woodwork in the whole house. So that's kind of how I work. So we're in the living room. As you can see, it's got a nice yellow sofa in it. Yellow velvet curtains were something I bought from my niece in New York, and they were really for a set, the set of the film I made last year. This lovely old yellow leather chair, which my partner got me for, I believe, my, I keep saying 40th birthday now, because I've never gone beyond that. So many years ago, he bought it for me. And then this is made by Retruvius, I believe, and the boys got it for me for my birthday, and it's a light. Got that on eBay, and it's an Italian 60s light. So as you can see, my decoration's quite sparse, and all pictures or artworks or ceramics I buy are mostly from friends. So this is my office. It doubles up as a study to write in, because I write a lot of my films. I have the window behind my desk, which means I'm a fire freak. So in winter, I love watching a fire, and I'm very lucky that in most rooms in the house, we have working fireplaces. And occasionally squirrels come down the chimney. That's slightly more frightening, but that's in summer. In the painting of this house, I have experimented a lot with doing half colors. So I've put the paint sort of three quarters of the way up. Again, there's no rule to it. I just do it by eye. Paint shop called Atelier Ellis, and I think it's called Fallen Plum. And that was inspired by the use of very dark colors in Fiona Shaw's apartment in the film I made called Park Avenue. So this is a very large bathroom. I came up with the idea of painting the floor this green, which is a favorite color of mine, but then I continued it up halfway across the wall. So it continues with this idea of always having two different colors on the wall. And then there's Hannah Collins's amazing photograph, which just kind of was perfect here. This is Barcelona roofs. And then there's my brilliant Jemima Kirk, which is my niece, whose curtains I bought. I'm a great believer in sharing art. I often say to my ex-husband, let me have a few of your artworks for a few years, and you can have a few of mine. And it's quite a nice thing to do swapsies because you tend to just walk past art and photographs, you get so used to it. So it makes you look at them and moving them to different rooms is really good. So we're in our rather large bedroom, which is actually was two bedrooms, is now one bedroom. My big signature thing is I make curtains a lot and I always put lots of different fabrics that I find together. And as a result of the red in the curtains and the red on the floor, and then I've got an old Susani on the bed that's red, I thought, oh, maybe I'll paint half the wall red around the fireplace, so the old chimney. And I'm quite pleased with the fireplace. And this was leftover wood from the wood paneling in the kitchen. So again, this is very organically put together and annoyingly the light, the central chandelier used to be our kitchen light and it was in a higher ceiling. So we've chopped it as much as we can, but I can't have any very tall lovers come and visit me because they're going to knock their head. I had to add these, what do they call, bistro curtains because I'm a bit of a flasher and every bathroom has glass paneled kind of doors to it, even the guest loo downstairs. So a lot of people come to dinner and they don't dare have a wee. So they get really self-conscious and come back and say, but it's open. And I said, yes, but no one's interested. I also have a bathroom, but it's called a shop. So I don't like building cupboards because they're very, very expensive to build cupboards, built-in cupboards. Plus I never really liked them. So I've just got rails. So it's like my clothes shop. My films are quite stylized and have a very particular look. Even though the stories change, I suppose often my children say, but mum, it's just like the last film you made. I hate them for that. But anyway, storytellers always draw from their own lives. So yes, you will see a film I've made or even a play with bits of furniture from home that I've taken. And then vice versa, I bring stuff off the set or buy it off the set after we finish shooting because obviously I love it. I think that every piece of furniture and every fabric, every curtain actually tells a story. And if it doesn't, then I don't really think it belongs in the home that you're living in.