An Elegant Notting Hill Flat Enlivened By Maximalist Flourishes

In 2012, soon after graduating from the Inchbald Faculty of Structure in London, the Turkish designer Enis Karavil was dwelling in the city’s Belgravia neighborhood and functioning nearby — for the London Design and style Pageant — at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He expended considerably of his weekends, having said that, a several miles northwest in Notting Hill, browsing at Portobello Market place, which is made up of a mile-lengthy string of street sellers who have been congregating there considering the fact that the late 1860s, and which, thanks to the so-identified as rag and bone adult men — primarily, cart-wielding junk sellers — has about the previous eight many years progressed into an epicenter for antiques and eccentric bric-a-brac. Sooner or later, Karavil’s recurrent excursions, as effectively as the neighborhood’s lively environment, spurred him to appear for a location in Notting Hill. Very first, he set an offer you on a three-story London villa, but then he noticed an apartment that spanned two floors of a stucco-fronted townhouse constructed in the mid-19th century. Although it essential substantial love, he knew, mainly many thanks to an primary marble fire with neo-Classical corbel detailing and an strange wrought-iron spiral staircase, that it was exactly where he needed to be.

What he did not nevertheless know was that renovating the dwelling would usher in a new resourceful chapter for him. In excess of the following five months, Karavil worked to revive the property’s tranquil appeal, at which haphazard interventions and normal neglect experienced, over the decades, slowly chipped away. “I needed to make confident the interior mirrored the architecture of the creating, so that almost everything felt as nevertheless it had been right here because the beginning,” he says. In some methods, this meant placing matters back again the way they’d been. Commencing in the south-going through sitting space that anchors the condominium, Karavil reinstated attractive plasterwork molding, restored the trio of round-topped home windows that open onto a prolonged balcony and tore down ceiling storage that had been installed in the 2000s and stunted the room’s authentic generous proportions.

But Karavil also permit himself stray from the historic record, opening and brightening the space, and its mixture of old and new elements is 1 of a couple of evident contradictions that make the home so attractive. He taken out the door major from the entryway to the previously boxed-in kitchen, for occasion, and extra a serving hatch in the wall between the kitchen area and the sitting place. He also painted the partitions bone white — somewhat than any of the deep hues the Victorians may well have favored when the house was designed — put in tailor made stainless-steel cupboards in the kitchen and laid a reclaimed pinewood floor sourced from an old English tobacco manufacturing unit all through.

Another noteworthy pressure is that, for anyone who loves collecting, Karavil has kept the rooms remarkably and intentionally spare. The seating in the dwelling room mostly is made up of a single couch — a boxy brown leather layout by Umberto Asnago for Arflex — a vintage black pony skin club chair from the Nicole Farhi retail store in Chelsea and a trio of smaller, mother-of-pearl-inlaid dining chairs from an antiques retail store in Marylebone. There is also a slender Serge Mouille ground lamp, a tv-shielding lacquered monitor with mesh and gold patina detailing and a metal-trimmed tea stand.

However, Karavil’s far more maximalist side shines via below and there by way of many curios, which are prominently exhibited and give notes of theatricality. On the mantel of the marble fireplace, also positioned in the living space, is a glass dome encasing a trio of dried and painted mushrooms, their dim, globular varieties looking as though they are aspect artwork and portion science project, and on the eating desk is an aged butcher’s block topped with classic stationery accouterments. On the floor in entrance of the fireplace is an antique alligator rug nicknamed Bob that Karavil discovered at a Chelsea honest in 2016. And in a far corner of the area is a set of tailor made cabinets that homes pieces from his collection of more than 100 silver teapots. What started as a nod to the English custom of possessing afternoon tea — and to Karavil’s grandmother Sol’s copious assemblage of silverware — has grow to be a entire-scale obsession, and among his vessels are a pyramidal edition picked up at the Marché aux Puces in Paris and one with a plexiglass cope with sourced from Loads Road Auction House in London. “They’re these small things. But it normally amazes me how completely various they are from a single another,” states Karavil, who adds, “It’s the aspects that carry the shade for me.”

That’s absolutely true of his most loved product in the condominium, which didn’t appear from a layout studio or a flea sector but as an alternative from his maternal great-aunt, an artist named Suzanne Kutiel: Previously mentioned the fire hangs a glamorous oil portrait of her that was rendered in 1959, when she was 36 and dressed to go to a friend’s ball in her adopted homeland of Brazil. When she returned to Turkey in 1995, the portray was the only possession she brought back again with her. It appears to be out earlier a glass-topped eating table with mismatched wooden legs from the Georgian and Edwardian eras, at which sit a set of cartonlike papier-mâché 10313 stools, each of Karavil’s design and style, to the reverse wall, which is hung with 13 nameless male portraits bought at different antiques marketplaces. “A stadium for Suzanne,” he says.

By the time Karavil was generally done with the condominium, he was doing the job as an interior designer at the organization Hubert Zandberg, but then his mates, observing what he’d carried out with his have house, begun asking him to reimagine theirs. In 2015, just after he’d labored on households for pals in Boston and Istanbul, he decided to commence his have business, Sanayi313, with his brother, Amir, and to foundation it out of Turkey, where he realized he could produce environments, and provide products and solutions, that weren’t readily available everywhere else in the region.

Even nowadays, the Notting Hill flat stays a type of blueprint for his tasks — from an art-filled beach dwelling in Bodrum to Cafe di Dolce, a Parisian-design cafe in Istanbul in which visitors sit beneath an set up of some 2,000 acrylic peonies by the artist Nahide Büyükkaymakci — which all share a streamlined aesthetic that nods to Aged Environment natural beauty. This method extends to the Sanayi313 cafe and retail store, positioned on the mezzanine of the former car fix shop that properties the firm’s places of work in Maslak, an industrial district of Istanbul. The former serves a daily menu of seasonal fare to company seated at the exact same design of extensive glass desk in Karavil’s Notting Hill eating place, although the latter sells objects from the household line alongside a curated range of objects from other makers, like Karavil’s beloved Serge Mouille lighting, Taschen artwork textbooks and Cire Trudon candles.

The designer hopes one particular working day to open a very similar setup in West London. For now, he’s acquiring ready to current a 21-piece presenting of wood, ceramic and glass vases this spring, and operating on a furnishings collection. He lives in the Notting Hill flat about one particular 7 days a thirty day period. When he’s there, he likes to host impromptu wine and cheese events. Soon after his pals go home, he helps make for his bed room, a bijou area to the rear of the apartment that is appointed with a uncomplicated antique Iranian desk and a Flos Parentesi lamp. On the wall, in lieu of a headboard, is a wallpaper mural depicting a chlorobromide print of a nude by the Greenwich Village portrait photographer Atelier Von Behr titled “Rebecca, 1938.” The following morning, if his agenda allows, he wakes up, grabs an iced coffee, requires his black schnauzer, Polka, for a stroll and then heads to Portobello Current market.