Veere Grenney, the designer’s designer: ‘I can’t decorate without friction’

Veere Grenney was 23 when he arrived in London after following the hippy trail “in reverse”, across Nepal, India and Afghanistan from his native New Zealand. In pre-gentrified 1970s west London, rents were still cheap. Slotting easily into a bohemian crowd, the long-haired, dungaree-wearing Grenney moved in to an apartment in Little Venice, transforming the stark interior with fabrics and knick-knacks gathered on his travels.

Today, Grenney cuts a dapper figure in head-to-toe blue, with oversized glasses. He is the designer’s designer, admired by peers for interiors that are both classic and individual. Much has been written about this “mix” in interiors. What sets Grenney apart is his flair for unusual juxtapositions — the wonky pot on a classical column; the Maori-inspired weave covering a 19th-century chair; lemon yellow walls against potted-shrimp pink — which never jar.

The hippy years were a formative influence. “Encountering craftspeople on my travels gave me a great appreciation of the handmade. It’s contrast — humble and grand, refined and tactile — that makes a room interesting,” he says. “I don’t like things to be shabby, but I can’t decorate without friction. There should always be something that sparks a conversation.

“I’ve learnt that interior design is not an exercise in simply shopping [ . . . ] it’s far more complex and refined than that.”

Our interview takes place in Grenney’s apartment in Chelsea. The Art Deco block, popular with musicians and actors in the 1960s, was built by the London Electricity Board in 1936 with then avant-garde underfloor heating. Grenney appreciates its mix of “utility and classicism”: sash windows contrast with the Crittall doors that open on to the tiny balcony. Previous owners had torn down walls, leaving a soulless open-plan living space. He wasted no time in reconfiguring the floor plan by reinstating the sitting room. A second bedroom is now a walk-in wardrobe, opposite the “metropolitan” marble-clad bathroom. “It reminds me of a suite at The Carlyle [in New York]: it has everything I need.”

Grenney is an avowed aesthete whose “quest for beauty”, he says, is expressed in design and decoration. The 620 square foot apartment distils his “creative DNA, the influences which have shaped me”. It is featured alongside his other homes, in Tangier and Suffolk, in his latest book Seeking Beauty.

The hallway walls, glowing with brown lacquer like molten chocolate, are a tribute to US designer Billy Baldwin’s “phenomenally chic” East Side studio, Grenney says. The floor, inlaid with a star motif, is linoleum in a nod to Michael Inchbald, who helped found the eponymous London interior-design school: “It’s a humble material, but he made it look marvellous, like marble in an Italian palazzo.” Half-glazed doors, which illuminate the glossy surfaces, are another favourite device.

Grenney says he is not “overly fond of kitchens” — but his suggests otherwise. It is a delight: yolk-yellow and lined in white tiles which remind him of an Edwardian scullery with a petite, flip-up table for morning coffee.

In the drawing room, the brown velvet sofa — “a bit nightclubby, a bit Duchess of Windsor” — is his own design. The late designer David Hicks — who he discovered as an interiors-fixated teenager — inspired the geometric carpet. It creeps in to the bedroom, where the walls are lined in alpaca wool. Grenney designed the windowpane-check fabric of the tailored four poster, of which he is a proponent. “Research has shown that you sleep better in them.”

He has always been drawn to 20th-century British paintings. A set of “ultra-vivid” gouaches in the sitting room is by Roger Hilton. He occasionally sells an artwork to fund a new purchase, such as the Sir John Lavery painting which hangs in his hillside villa in Tangier. But there are some objects he will never part with. The cerulean blue vase, reflected in a mirrored niche, used to belong to Cecil Beaton. For Grenney, who was a keen practitioner of meditation in his twenties, the sculpture of a shrouded figure in the hallway has a “timeless[ . . . ] spiritual” appeal. The glowing oil painting above of Holy Island in Northumberland is by Craigie Aitchison. His sister, the artist Sarah Guppy, made the gilded crucifix which hangs by his bed, “like a call to integrity”.  

This prompts an incongruous memory. As a teenager in 1960s Auckland (“Surrey in the south Pacific”), he briefly harboured an ambition to become a vicar. But design magazines, awash with “conversation pits and shag pile carpets” changed that: “I saw this world of glamour and beauty that sung in my heart.”

His English parents moved often, with Grenney helping his mother rearrange the furniture or fill vases with flowers from the garden. Inspired by Hicks — whose former home, a neoclassical fishing lodge in Suffolk, Grenney now leases — he covered his bedroom walls in orange hessian, adding a chequerboard floor and Victorian bedstead. It was, as he says his sister likes to remind him, “out there”.  

He cycled around the local streets, scrutinising the 19th-century houses. “They were weatherboarded with large verandas or inspired by Voysey or Lutyens,” he says. “I was gripped by how people lived in a building. The relationship of sun to the house. Where the light fell.”  

“‘If you were white and middle class, New Zealand was a pleasant place to be,” he continues. But it lacked the “friction” requisite for creativity. “I had a vague ambition to do something with houses. But in the world I came from you couldn’t pursue an education in decoration like you could in America.” So travel beckoned.

To fund his trip, he took a job in the Australian outback driving trucks for a mobile gas pipeline company. “It was a hugely influential part of my life. Jumbo jets were on the horizon. The only people travelling were the very rich, or hippies. So much of the world was still agricultural. The people we met — also seeking novelty and difference — have stayed with me.”

Like that of the late Robert Kime, Grenney’s route into interiors was through antiques. A stall on Portobello Road led to a shop on nearby Westbourne Grove. “I sold Arts and Crafts furniture, jewellery, textiles — things I could afford.” To fund his purchases, he had an evening job at Julie’s, a cultish hothouse-plant-strewn restaurant which drew a like-minded “cool” crowd.

Mary Fox Linton, then in partnership with David Hicks, noting Grenney’s eye for beautiful things, offered him a job. “She said, ‘Why don’t you join us darling?’ Until then, I’d had no idea how to break into design. I entered a new, world of sharp chic decorating with subtle palettes mixed with Perspex furniture, or dhurrie rugs. It was exciting.”

That led eventually to a directorship at Sibyl Colefax & Fowler. A fellow designer once described Grenney as a “contemporary John Fowler”. But as a “New Zealander — and an outsider”, he initially chafed at the 90-year-old company’s precise way of doing things. “I quickly realised it was the best decision I ever made because I learnt about couture. How the cut of something affects the outcome; how to combine different fabrics,” he says, gesturing to walls lined in chintz with a slender braid trim. “I realised there was an element of scholarship behind interiors. It’s like art. You can’t be a good abstract painter unless you understand figurative art.”

In 1996, he set up on his own. He now works all over the world and has always felt at home in the US — “they love decorating — and change” — where he is currently working on properties in Charleston, South Carolina, and New York. With a team of 12, he has designed a suite at Claridge’s but prefers residential commissions to the “anonymity” of commercial projects. This is because he still likes to be involved in every aspect — from the poetic inscription on a garden wall to the width of a glazing bar — just as he is in his own homes.

Does he have the energy to tackle another one? “Absolutely!” He has already earmarked the location, in south Morocco, where he plans to build a house from scratch. A poetic image unfurls. “It will be Egyptian inspired with hieroglyphs in the great room. There will mud-built walls and steel windows with wooden surfaces, desert-dried to be almost white.” Both modern and ancient, in short, with all the conversation-sparking juxtapositions that have come to define Grenney’s singular approach to “the business of beauty.”

Favourite thing

Veere Grenney does not know who made the terracotta sculpture of a veiled figure in his hallway, but it has always intrigued him. “I bought it from a famous dealer, John Jesse, who used to have a shop on Kensington Church Street. It might be a nun, a shrouded Islamic woman, or an Arts and Crafts woman. It was probably made in the 19th century, in the manner of Sir Frederic Leighton. Both humble and earthy, it suggests something transcendental and speaks deeply to me.”  

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