The first thing you notice when you step into Michael Halpern’s east London penthouse are the freshly cut flowers filling the otherwise scarcely furnished open-plan area. “I don’t have a green thumb, I’m terrible with plants, but I’m great with cut flowers,” says the fashion designer, whose fans include Adwoa Aboah and Amal Clooney. “I get mine from New Covent Garden Market. You have to get up at 4.30am because by 6am everything has gone — but it’s very therapeutic.”
Overlooking the warehouses of Clerkenwell, Halpern’s flat is flooded with light, but there is a notable absence of, well, stuff — which is unexpected for a designer whose showstopping gowns are known for their defiant colour and extravagant detail. But when the 32-year-old moved into his new home this summer, he was looking for a clean slate.
“My old place in Chelsea was a lot more traditional. Dark velvet, a blood-red carpet, dark floors and the walls were covered in picture frames. So I wanted this to be a lot lighter,” he says. And there’s no trace here of the Victorian home he left behind; instead the walls in the converted brewery are mostly bare and the white sofa (a king-size 1980s Italian number) blends right in. “There’s something I really liked about it being white and clean, yet at sunset the whole room is tinted orange and pink, even the furniture.”
It is subtle details such as these that mark out Halpern’s apartment. The walls aren’t simply white, for instance, but are slightly creamy to offset the bright daylight. Another detail is the sensory overload he has carefully curated, from the scent of the Le Labo Petit Grain 21 candle saturating the air to the sounds of the Jamaican singer Derrick Harriott coming from the speakers. “There’s always music playing, ” he says.
His resettling to Clerkenwell, where he lives alone, has been a full-circle moment. Before moving to London in 2012, Halpern — a native New Yorker — lived in Tribeca, lower Manhattan. Clerkenwell is as close as London gets to New York’s warehouse district, he says.
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Elements of the apartment certainly have an industrial feel, such as the kitchen with its brushed metal cabinets and worktop and the large-scale dining table. One wall, however, is filled with colourful artwork, and next to the brightly decorated papier-mâché masks from his travels to Mexico are a number of Russian Orthodox icons, gold paintings of saints from the late 19th century that were collected by his grandmother, as well as a large print of a photograph he took at a birthday party.
Most of the pieces in his home are vintage finds such as the mid-century sideboard in the lounge that he sourced on Vinterior, an online marketplace for vintage furniture. “I’ve got a lot of things from there. It has these super-rare things such as pieces that come from South America and belonged to some drug lord in the Sixties.”
Halpern is also a fan of rugs. “For me, the most important thing is that the floors have to be comfortable. I grew up in New York and it’s really cold so you have to have rugs everywhere, and I like layering them. In the living room I have a big jute rug and put another one on top —that’s quite an American thing to do.” There’s even a rug in the kitchen with a crane motif designed by Wendy Morrison. “If you want to be decadent, you should be decadent and have a white rug under the dining room table,” he laughs.
