“Colour is so cheerful. It lights up your life; I can’t imagine living without it,” says Dame Zandra Rhodes as we relax in her rainbow-coloured living room overlooking the Shard. It is just what you would expect from the doyenne of flamboyant fashion, who still flaunts shocking pink hair at 77 and has clad icons from Queen’s Freddie Mercury to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie, as well as Princess Diana, Helen Mirren and Shirley Bassey.
“I painted these walls every shade of the spectrum in 2002,” says Rhodes of her property behind London Bridge station. Even the building’s exterior is bright orange and pink — she shares her London home with the Fashion and Textile Museum.
“Later, when I could afford it, I started on the floor with these beautiful Amtico tiles. Other things come and go, but I’ve had my dining table, which can seat up to 15, since 1965, when I was teaching at High Wycombe College of Art and they taught me how to make it in the furniture department. I designed it in two pieces, so the curves can be stacked.”
Rhodes has lived here since 2001 — six years after buying the building and raising the funds to convert most of it into a museum celebrating artists who share her love for colour, pattern and fabulous fabrics.
Rhodes herself has spread this love far and wide beyond the realms of fashion and into the home over the decades. So it is a little disapppointing that her walls are not papered with her Osborne & Little designs, nor are the windows dressed with curtain fabric created for Heals or cushions from her previous ranges.
But the pillows lining her sofa are covered with scraps of her beautiful dress fabrics and at least one of her fabulous new range of rugs for Floor Story has made it up to her Bermondsey Street penthouse. The rugs feature lots of pink and fantastical patterning, depicting everything from Tutankhamun’s leopard to a Mexican star motif and a crazy wiggle design. This last comes in sober silver and a rich midnight blue and gold as well as her signature shade.
“My own furnishings come from the most unlikely sources,” she says, waving her hand towards a built-in sofa salvaged from a friend’s office reception area and the 20 dining chairs in bright pink and purple. She bought these at an exhibition from which they were destined to be packed up when the show was over. “They were so perfect for me in those colours, I told them I’d take the lot,” she says with satisfaction.
When more than 20 diners need to sit, as when Rhodes hosts a reception for the exhibiting artist of the moment (currently Orla Kiely), she employs the giant wooden, glitter-covered Zs which used to be props in her boutique.
The designer divides her life between London and California: “I follow ten days here with three weeks there,” she says. Her other house overlooks the beach near San Diego, where she lives with Salah Hassanein, her long-term partner, now 97. “He is very conservative, so our downstairs rooms are much more sober than here, but upstairs I’ve got a lovely turquoise room with an Andrew Logan four-poster bed and silver balls hanging from the ceiling,” she says. She is close friends with Logan, the glass artist and furniture designer whose glass bust of her sits in the V&A. “Another bedroom is blue and cream with bows, another is red with an Indian window and I have had all the balconies overlooking the sea floored by the terrazzo artist who did the lobby.”
No aspect of home décor is too humble to be honoured by an artist — witness that amazing lobby floor, awash in a pattern redolent of sea and stars, plus vases by two artists she has collected since their student days at the Royal College of Art. She dines off the china she designed for Royal Doulton ten years ago, alongside her own collection of mugs emblazoned with lipsticks, just about the only item she sells through her website.
Her designs extend into costumes for opera and ballet — “I got this Emmy for the costumes for Romeo and Juliet On Ice,” she says, proudly waving her statuette. And her love of textiles has also brought her smaller honours which are dear to her heart, such as opening a show of Torah mantles at Bevis Marks synagogue a few years ago: “There was an exquisite 17th century one made from a Spanish dress.” The event reconnected her with the East End, where her mother, a fitter for Worth, was addressed only in Yiddish by stallholders who identified her as one of their own. She then moved to Kent, where Rhodes was born.
“I feel intensely Jewish — I know all the Passover songs!” she says, attributing this to her move to America — “I don’t think my best friend David Sassoon, who is Sephardi, would think of inviting me to a Seder, but in America I’ve been included in lots; I learnt all the songs phonetically.”
Her London home is an ongoing project: “I long to redecorate my bathroom and put one of my new rugs in there.
“But I can barely get my work done — I just did a collection for Valentino, I’m still creating bespoke dresses for clients and I’m working on a new book about my 50 years,” she says, with an incredulous giggle.
All who have crossed the path of this pink-haired punk princess in that time must surely feel brighter for the experience.
Zandra Rhodes’ rugs are available from Floor Story, floorstory.co.uk
