Antique dealer and interior designer Adam Bray describes himself as ‘very much a creature of central London’. We’re in his apartment in Maida Vale, a few streets off Abbey Road, which he’s rented for the better part of a decade from an old client who’s become a good friend. Occupying most of the ground floor of a stucco-fronted villa built around 1840, this is the furthest north he’s ever been, although it’s only a mile from where he grew up. His father had a flat on Chiltern Street in Marylebone (‘before it was smart’) and he was a product of what he called the Long Sixties (a period which in fact included the early to mid-Seventies) when the city still had a sense of post-war decay and hippiedom.
‘School didn’t really give me anything, I probably owe my entire education to the Westminster library system,’ says Adam, because that’s where he first became interested in photography and cinema. ‘Avedon, Irving Penn, French and Italian movies of the fifties and sixties, which I watched for sex and style. I had a kind of latent nostalgia for that time. The rooms in the Godard films were unlike anything I had seen before. And when I first became interested in interiors, that was the period I was drawn to. Billy Baldwin, Parrish Hadley, David Hicks. It was very masculine, the kind of decor I like. Although obviously, as you can see, the main inspiration in my house is film Withnell and I,’ he laughs, gesturing to rip into the silver Claremont damask on his sofa. ‘The whole place is in pieces.’
The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. Bursts in upholstery, a picture of Ram Dass taped to the sink, a mantelpiece filled with Polaroids, postcards and ephemera, piles and piles of books. These items spice up Adam’s typical recipe of strong colours, fine fabrics (some antique, his own designs), mid-century Italian lighting and ‘big lumps’ of 19th and 20th century English furniture. A look, a balance of bohemian and urban, that can really thrive in the feverish, cosmopolitan atmosphere of its home city. This has earned him a cult following, a roster of film people and pop stars as clients, and long-standing collaborations with brands such as Sonne Britten, VanderHeard, Plain English and Papers & Paints.
