Posh&decs

The Look: Bacchus meets Starck

Tara Bernard prepares a lavishly Roman feast for the senses – with a modern twist.

In Britain’s interior design firmament, Tara Bernard, co-founder of Target Living, inhabits a parallel universe of boundless bling. In her typically ritzy designs for glam developments and duplexes – as well as a hair salon in Chelsea and a shooting lodge in Devon – you could almost describe her signature palette as Christmassy.

‘I’m recognised for my use of strong colour,’ Bernard says. ‘Christmas is the time to really use it, but the thing to do is to keep a tonally narrow range.’ Aside from the frenetically psychedelic Paul Smith-designed rug under her dining table, in home Bernard has limited herself this year to berry reds, oranges and lush forest greens.

She paints a suitably Bacchanalian picture of her ideal Christmas décor: ‘I’ll have a big table dripping like a Roman feast. For me, Christmas is about the gatherings, the festivities, the warmth emanating from the dining table. Christmas is about a 3D sensuality; its not just about the visual aspect but about intoxicating smells.’

On this occasion she has teamed up with renowned florist Rob van Helden, who has decked Bernard’s table with his candles smelling of lily of the valley, orange blossom, cloves and cedarwood, not to mention super-sized candelabras crowned with fragrant skimmia, poinsettia, crab apples, crimson roses and chilli peppers, as well as candles under ‘gimbals’ (fireproof shades). Around their bases are Sixties Murano class vases and ashtrays (the latter containing salt), Baccarat champagne flutes and amethyst-coloured wine glasses by Ralph Lauren.

‘At Christmas, bring out your favourite china and vases,’ interjects van Helden. ‘Your Christmas table should look like a banquet, but a modern one, with mismatched vases and glasses.’

Although Bernard has conformed to a trad Christmas palette of reds and oranges, what marks her style out is the juxtaposition of old and new furniture. ‘I’d rather have a modern dining table than an old-fashioned one. Mine, in Lucite and chrome, is Seventies. The chairs are Starck’s Eros chairs. As a backdrop, I wanted a big, bold, simple abstract painting, so I bought this canvas by James Nares. And though candlelight always has a place at Christmas, I love to use fairy lights,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing more magical than a huge tree and an abundance of mistletoe.’

Edgar Allan Poe meets Jack Frost

Russell Sage mixes Victorian gothic with the roots of a Pagan Christmas

‘People are much too traditional with their Christmas decorations,’ asserts interior and fashion designer Russell Sage. ‘Young people nowadays don’t aspire to living in big Georgian family homes but in loft spaces. That kind of environment calls for oversized things. I love the idea of a 20ft-long Christmas tree lying on its side.’

So much for this idiosyncratic logic. When Sage decorates bars and restaurants come Christmas – his London projects include the Chelsea restaurant Papillon, Shoreditch bar Found and Mayfair private members’ club 43 South Molton Street – his left-field approach is more extravagant still. At Found this year he has suspended Christmas trees upside-down from the ceiling. For a recent party there for the Osbourne’s he decked out the place with ghoulish Yule decs, including skulls, ‘which the Osbournes nicked’.

Continuing his infatuation with gothic chic, for a set created this year for the London antique shop Talisman (above) he has created a strongly Satanic atmosphere. Walls are raven-black. On a towering mantelpiece sit antique Javanese monkey skulls on metal stands. In the fireplace a wooden monkey effigy crouches beside two cast-iron elephant bones. Impaled on the spikes of a skeletal, metal chandelier are sheep skulls found on the moors. And Sage has constructed a Christmas tree made of writhing antlers, topped not by a winsome fairy but an antique impala horn, wrapped with cutesy fairy lights.

Florist Jamie Aston has accentuated the room’s high-gothic feel with a twisted, dark take on Christmas: ‘I’ve installed a cascading glossy black birch chandelier dripping with black icicles and bejewelled strands,’ he says, ‘and metallic-looking feather wreaths with clusters of gently gilded roses.’ And Aston’s top tip for Christmas blooms? ‘Add a touch of glitter to your flowers, spray foliage, then dust it with iridescent glitter to simulate frost.’

Sage would describe his style as ‘pagan’ – Christmas is about dragging the natural world indoors. I love the idea of a ceiling smothered with branches and ivy’ – with an instinctive Victorian vibe. Victorian, that is, in an Edgar Allan Poe, not a Queen Victoria way: Prince Albert, he thinks, spoilt Christmas with his prissy trees. ‘I don’t like primped, expensive Christmas decorations. I love the passion behind doing decorations more than the objects themselves.’

King Gustav meets the Space Age

Kit Kemp creates an ice-cool Swedish café style with a mini-glacier and abstract art.

A deep-seated aversion to Christmas at its most tawdrily commercial first drove Kit Kemp’s hotelier husband, Tim, to spend every family Christmas at their home in Barbados. Now the family create an ‘exotic Christmas’ at their island home, where their decorations are all hand-made by Kit’s three daughters – out of eggboxes, cotton wool, tinsel and glitter – and hung on plants.

Tim is the co-owner and interior designer behind the boutique hotel group Firmdale (famous for its Soho, Covent Garden and Charlotte Street hotels), where Christmas is more formal. ‘At Soho Hotel, I fill huge glass vases with coloured baubles. There’ll be big arrangements of fruit and vegetables, like artichokes, and hazel twigs and wreaths crowd the windows. And I’ll rub white Meltonian show polish on furniture, then sprinkle it with glitter for a faux-snow effect.’

Although she admits to a weakness for the classic Crimbo combo of ‘green foliage and red berries’, Kit believes Christmas is ‘about all things wintry – frost on the lawn, that real winter nip in the air’. Hence the icily cool colours of her room-set for Talisman (pictured), where she frequently picks up furniture for her hotels. The inspiration here is ‘a Scandinavian café’. She has chosen stately painted wood furniture – a dining table and 12 chairs – in the Swedish 18th Century Gustavian style. By contrast, a huge Sixties space-age abstract Lucite sculpture resembling a mini-glacier shoots up from the middle of the table. Yet Kemp has stuck assiduously to the Swedish theme in other respects: on the table, hollowed-out silver birch logs are used as vases for anemones, mounds of moss are sprinkled seasonally with fake snow, real Swedish circular flat breads serve wittily as place mats and napkins are bound with raffia and adorned with birch twigs and rosemary sprigs. There are also artificial crystallised pears that glitter as if frozen in frost.

Stephen Wicks, of Bloomsbury Flowers, provided the forest-like flowers. ‘I wanted them to look very natural, hence all the moss, birch twigs and convincing fake snow.’ His contribution might look anything but understated, but when advising others on how to decorate their homes he advocates restraint: ‘Focus on “accent places” like the tree and fireplace. And remember, less is more. For a tree, try a natural look, weaving in twigs or wiring on pine cones. If you can use real candles for one day, do. Instead of a swag above the fireplace, line up clear containers full of pine cones and nuts on it. And for a splash of red, use amaryllis and roses. I myself never use poinsettia.’