Put all thoughts of that Danish mid-century teak armchair you’ve been stalking on eBay out of your mind, and start looking for a leopard-print sofa. Kate Moss is swapping her Saint Laurent duffel bag for a book of fabric swatches and a Farrow and Ball discount card. Moss is reported to have registered a new Kate Moss Interiors Ltd business at Companies House, signalling an intention to diversify from fashion into interior design. If Moss is even a fraction as influential on our sitting rooms as she has been on our wardrobes, our homes will never be the same again.
Last year, Moss designed the interior of The Barnhouse, a five-bedroom country house that is part of The Lakes, a swish development of modern Cotswolds country homes. For that project, she was hired by John Hitchcox, chairman of design company YOO, with whom she explained she had bonded over a shared love of “the English countryside – and the pub!” Now, it seems as if The Barnhouse has given Moss a taste for the traditional middle-aged obsessions with soft furnishings and landscaping. In the fashion industry, she has leveraged her “eye” in order to move beyond modelling into designing (for Topshop and Longchamp) and styling (for British Vogue, where she is a contributing fashion editor). And as the owner of two very grownup houses – a Highgate town house once lived in by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a Cotswolds retreat – Moss seems to be about to repeat the same trick in interiors, and turn her taste into a brand.
What does all this mean for your house? Wall-to-wall skinny-jean storage and designer ashtrays? Actually, no. While her taste in clothes retains a consistently backstage-rock-chick-made-good vibe – her last Topshop collection showed an undimmed passion for shrunken leather jackets, vintage-store cocktail looks, embroidered kaftans – her taste in interiors is, by contrast, notably more grownup. A year ago, she gave Vogue a tour of her London home. Between the inevitable war trophies of any survivor of the Primrose Hill set – leopard-print scatter cushions, tabloidy contemporary British art, velvet sofas – were surprisingly conventional touches. Urns of garden roses on the sideboard, neatly stacked art books on the coffee table, bone-china mugs, gilt wall sconces and cream-shaded table lamps all made an appearance. The Barnhouse had plenty of trad, country-home touches, too, from brass cup handles on the kitchen cabinets to a log-burner focal point in the living room.
Invite to Kate’s 42nd birthday party this Saturday still inexplicably lost in the post? Us too! Weird. But no matter: soon you can live the Moss lifestyle in the comfort of your own home. See you on the velvet sofa.
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