Inside Adam Bray’s eclectic Maida Vale flat

I like Italian mid-century lighting.

I like 20th century decorative arts,

that sort of bolstered up by big lumps of oak furniture.

That's basically the look.

[gentle music]

I'm an interior decorator and an antique dealer.

Been here for about 10 years, maybe a bit longer.

Haven't done a lot to the place since I moved in.

Obviously my main interior decorating inspiration

is the film with Nail and I, as you can see,

the whole place is totally falling to pieces.

I grew up in Central London actually, in Baker Street

and I kind of left school, I mean, or school left me

and my dad was like, well, you're not gonna hang about.

And I had to go to the job center on the Edgware Road

and there was a job working for an antique dealer.

So I went and worked for this very strange outfit

on Marilyn High Street, very Edwardian,

chain smoking, tea drinking lady.

It was one of those weird things that it sort of found me,

rather than me finding it.

I'd always been really interested in photography

and cinema, French movies

and Italian movies of the 50s and 60s.

I used to watch those movies mainly for the sex

and the style, you know, that you see in Godard films.

And then when I first started getting interested in rooms,

that was the period

that first interested me looking at Billy Baldwin,

looking at Parish Hadley, looking at David Hicks.

That kind of, I mean, it was very masculine,

the sort of decorating that I liked.

I started dealing on my own

and I had a shop in what was at the time

a very hot street off Westborn Grove.

I sold things to Lucian Freud,

to Anish Kapoor, John Galliano,

when I was that age, it was an a really kind of

an astonishing thing for me.

It was kind of like, almost like a fantasy in itself

to have the things that I liked

being approved of by people like that.

By the time the shop was closed,

I had started decorating very accidentally.

I've got two large rooms, one of which is my office

where I work, and then this sort of big sitting room

and a kitchen and a tiny bathroom

and a room where my children sleep,

which nobody wants to go in there.

[gentle music]

Furniture plans, they're kind of self designing.

Just have to think about it in a sensible way.

I want to sit near the fire

and be able to look at the television.

They're two basic human needs.

So I mean, that's really it, you know,

I mean the fireplace does all the heavy lifting

and it's like a lot of things with decorating.

You need, you know, good solid architectural element.

You can get away with murder, as you can see.

Got very nice Moroccan dish

that I broke on the way home from the airport.

I've got some Indian puppets

of Hanuman and Ganesh.

I've got these speakers which are old studio monitors

'cause I like music.

And I had this sofa, poor old lady, she's a sad,

she's gonna have a bit of work done.

It's an old, it's a Howard model sofa.

And this is a chair that we make in a fabric of mine.

And I've got a big mahogany cupboard over there

that's got, I mean, don't laugh, all my sports gear in it.

I've built a little nook in the corner here,

which is very weird, but it kind of works for me.

And I've got all these screens.

I collect these, I don't really collect anything,

but I do buy these Baumann screens whenever I see them.

It sort of works for me and I'm quite cozy in that.

Plus obviously I can look at the fire.

[upbeat music]

This is my office, this is where we work.

The walls are the same color as the sitting room,

which is one of these papers

and paints kind of putty colors.

I have a lot of tables in here

'cause I like to lay everything out flat.

This is a beautiful lamp.

It's called the Pipistrelle like bat.

It is something with sentimental value

'cause one of my kids knocked it over

and broke the shade, rendering it completely valueless.

Ashtrays from the 1980s in the shape of boxing gloves.

Obviously there's all of these samples of the books

that we sort of tend to use the most

and suppliers that we tend to use the most.

And then I've got the big, the cupboard of shame,

which is surprisingly tidy.

Not that we were expecting visitors or anything.

I'm lucky that I've got two open fires here.

Flat has very big, drafty 19th century windows.

So he's been here in the winter.

It's a bit, Doctor Zhivago sometimes.

Do like things that aren't perfect.

You know, I'm not quite sure what perfection even means.

I got this wonderful La Cornue oven,

which you know, has two kind of settings,

you know, scorch or gently warm up.

There's nothing in between.

The light is one of those great Moroccan lanterns

made of old sardine tins, which I love.

This lamp is a really lovely thing.

It's a 1930s French industrial lamp.

There's this drawing ruined,

which is often how I feel by Sue Skeen.

Jeremy Deller, that poster let them eat bass.

I'm a huge admirer of his, piece of bunting,

which I think was kind of

maybe even first World War bunting, God save the King.

And then I've been buying

for some reason these silver things,

which is really kind of ye oldy antique shop.

The bigger one is Caribbean silver.

It's had 28 years of children's birthday cakes on it.

And the bathroom through there is,

it's a complicated space 'cause it's very small.

So we had the idea of completely enclosing it in tiles

and putting in a wooden,

a Japanese bath in there, a wooden bath.

I like to bathe, you know,

and I like to sort of have a bit of a moment

and I listen to the radio.

I often call my friends

and they're like, so like, you're in the bath.

I'm like, yeah, do you mind us speaking later?

And I dunno why that's weird, but apparently it is.

[upbeat music]