‘Your home should be a place that inspires’: Lessons from the interior designer who has mastered the art of happy

On a recent February day in Toronto, as white winter skies spread flatly out with all the monotony of our lockdown days, I retreated into the pages of influential Swedish-born, London-based designer Beata Heuman’s new book, Every Room Should Sing (Rizzoli). Something stirred from deep within, a vaguely exotic feeling: it was hope. Each image, capturing the interiors Heuman divined, is alive with happy, defibrillating colour and pattern. (The name, Beata, appropriately, means “happy” in Latin.) Her spaces welcome and enchant with what we’ve so long missed this past year: freedom and spontaneity. I’d gladly, it occurs to me, self-isolate in any of these pages.

“Your home should be a place that inspires, that lets your imagination flourish,” Heuman tells me over the phone. “At its best, interior design can be transportive.” Even if the only place we can travel these days is into the attic of our memories. Living in the past is, we’ve long been told, not ideal — but living with the past can prove both comfort and escape. “Having things that are sentimental, from a parent or a grandparent, is so important and gives so much personality to your home,” says Heuman, whose interiors are as layered with colours, textures, patterns and scale, as much as they are with nostalgia and memories.

There is the tobacco-coloured mural in her daughter’s room inspired by the citified, cigar-smoking bunnies populating Ludwig Bemelmans’ magical mural at Bemelmans Bar at New York’s Carlyle Hotel, the juicy watermelon coloured floor inspired by one she once saw during her honeymoon in Sicily. And a trip to Versailles’ Petit Trianon, she tells me, inspired the design of the trellis outside her London home. “It’s ridiculous to be inspired by Versailles for our small townhouse,” she says, “It’s cliché, but inspiration can come from anything.” As she writes in her book: “I have been known to photograph loo paper holders in seedy inns.” But the place she visits most for inspiration is the republic of her own childhood in the south of Sweden, where she grew up on a farm in a tiny hamlet.

The more we chat, the more it seems, though, that it’s childhood itself, more than any physical place, that is arguably her biggest inspiration. “It’s about not forgetting how you think when you’re a child. As a small child, you’re not so aware of how things might come across or what is ‘right,’” she says, and she brings that festive, mirthful looseness to all her spaces, each making me feel as if I’ve been transported into a more fanciful wonderworld that is somehow more civilized for its playfulness, more refined for its whimsy.

Heuman shares a quote from writer Bruno Shulz, which may serve as her artistic credo: “The ideal goal is to ‘mature’ into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.” What’s important, she says, is variation and unexpected detail. “I like including elements of fantasy, things that are not quite of this world,” she says. Her so-called Dodo pendant lamps, which look like a cross between a giant egg and a pineapple, have a fantastical Carollian quality, her “cub armchairs” have paw feet and she often embroiders eyelashes onto the arms of her sofas. “We had this sofa and its arm just reminded me of a sea creature and I just thought, ‘let’s make this more obvious,’ so I put eyelashes on it,” she says. Another Heuman trademark: red and white stripes. “It’s beach parasol and fun and summery, but it’s also bold and classic,” she says.

As Diana Vreeland famously said, the eye has to travel. And now, only our eyes can travel. Mine are currently on a flight to Corsica, or maybe under a red-and-white striped beach parasol, or, come to think of it, curled up on the Josef Frank-upholstered daybed facing the bay window in Heuman’s singing London townhouse.

The Star understands the restrictions on travel during the coronavirus pandemic. But like you, we dream of travelling again, and we’re publishing this story with future trips in mind.