Newspaper Article

A right royal makeover

York, Peter

2008

Overview

Tricia Guild says they haven't simply reproduced anything, they've taken designs and re-thought them and re-coloured them. But there's no mistaking the way the look's going from the brochure and the DVD. The upholstery fabrics are used on old gilded sofas and chairs. The background's packed with Boulle furniture, 18th-century oils and Svres vases in that piercing blue-green, the instant international language of 19th-century plutocratic collecting. It's because they're using so much of it in one go - shiny silk on shiny silk plus grand flock wallpaper - that it could be a bit heavy-going for younger, Western European and North American tastes (though you can imagine it in those Nancy Reagan lookalikes' houses in Palm Beach). But in the lovely rich BRIC countries - especially Russia - you can just see them buying the whole package. Could it really be that Designers' Guild - refuge of Chelsea girls everywhere - is giving the Queen a 21st-century makeover? That King's Road shop full of New Agey combos (a Bertoia chair, say, with upholstery in shocking-pink cut velvet)? Its guiding light, Tricia Guild, likes to take some blazing Howard Hodgkin colours, a bit of knocked-back Frenchy rural cupboarding and combine them with Milanese white leather sofas. Tricia Guild absolutely doesn't do tea-washed retro fabric like Bennison, or archive prints like so many other fabric houses, or plum-pudding mahogany anything. Tricia Guild, who'd rather be in India looking at their shocking pink things, or in New York going round lofts with character pipework and over-scaled contemporary art. But it could, of course, be an inspired combination. Guild could re-colour and re-think the fabrics and wallpapers and sell them a lot harder than your average dinky decorator. She's got international distribution and she can talk up an idea like nobody's business.

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media
• Subject: Guild, Tricia