‘This’, says Sir Paul Smith, ‘is the reason why Pauline won’t come into this room anymore. It disturbs her. It’s too cluttered for her. It’s too… much.’ Pauline is, of course, his beloved wife, the woman he credits with helping to fashion Paul Smith the man and brand; the ‘this’ – the thing that gives her the heebie-jeebies – is the designer’s studio at company HQ in London. It was where he might be found during much of lockdowns I and II, working all alone on successive collections in a building that normally thrums with the activity of 180 or so employees, and it’s where we’re compelled to meet, via the wizardry of Zoom. That’s no bad thing, however, a man cave telling us much about a man’s character – and, though it’s really quite different, his marital home.
The house stands in a square developed in the 1850s that the couple had long admired. Seen past white hydrangeas, the Mini in the frame recalls the model covered in trademark stripes that was one of several collaborations aired in the Design Museum’s 2013 retrospective of Sir Paul’s career
©simon upton
At first glance all looks perfectly orderly, perfectly Paul Smithian, in fact: behind him is the sort of arty gallery wall that will be familiar from any number of his 100-plus shops worldwide, this one featuring a Dame Laura Knight, a Cecil Beaton pen-and-ink drawing and a sketch by Yves Saint Laurent. But then his director of brand and communications swivels the camera to address the elephant in the (Zoom) room: books and periodicals by the thousand, piles and piles of tchotchkes and toys, enough cycling paraphernalia to furnish a museum. And that’s before you even get to the bikes. Er, how many exactly? There’s a sharp intake of breath. ‘Seventeen. Five in this room and 12 next door,’ he says, gesturing to an antechamber. I mutter something impolite about it resembling a Channel 5 documentary on hoarding and it’s to Sir Paul’s great credit that he chooses to run with the quip rather than abruptly press the button marked ‘end meeting’. Geniality is him all over. The interesting thing, he says proudly, is that the architects David Chipperfield and John Pawson, archminimalists both, have visited the studio and ‘didn’t have heart attacks’.