Supermodel Kate Moss to turn interior designer?

Kate Moss.

LONDON • Put all thoughts of that Danish mid-century teak armchair you have been stalking on eBay out of your mind and start looking for a leopard-print sofa.

Kate Moss is swopping her Saint Laurent duffel bag for a book of fabric swatches.

She is reported to have registered a new Kate Moss Interiors business at Companies House, signalling an intention to diversify from fashion into interior design.

If she is even a fraction as influential in the sitting rooms as she has been on people's wardrobes, their homes will never be the same again.

Last year, she designed the interior of The Barnhouse, a five-bedroom country house that is part ofThe Lakes, a swish development of modern Cotswolds country homes.

For that project, she was hired by John Hitchcox, chairman of design company YOO, with whom she explained she had bonded over a shared love of "the English countryside - and the pub".

Now, it seems as if The Barnhouse has given Moss a taste for the traditional middle-aged obsessions with soft furnishings and landscaping.

In the fashion industry, she has leveraged her "eye" in order to move beyond modelling into designing (for Topshop and Longchamp) and styling (for British Vogue, where she is a contributing fashion editor).

And as the owner of two very grown-up houses - a Highgate townhouse once lived in by English poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a Cotswolds retreat - Moss seems to be about to repeat the same trick in interiors and turn her taste into a brand.

What does all this mean for your house? Wall-to-wall skinny-jean storage and designer ashtrays? Actually, no.

While her taste in clothes retains a consistently backstage-rock-chick-made-good vibe - her last Topshop collection showed an undimmed passion for shrunken leather jackets, vintage-store cocktail looks and embroidered kaftans - her taste in interiors is, by contrast, notably more grown-up.

A year ago, she gave Vogue a tour of her London home. Between the inevitable war trophies of any survivor of the Primrose Hill set - leopard-print scatter cushions, tabloidy contemporary British art, velvet sofas - were surprisingly conventional touches.

Urns of garden roses on the sideboard, neatly stacked art books on the coffee table, bone-china mugs, gilt wall sconces and cream-shaded table lamps all made an appearance.

The Barnhouse had plenty of traditional, country- home touches too, from brass cup handles on the kitchen cabinets to a log-burner focal point in the living room.

GUARDIAN

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on January 23, 2016, with the headline Supermodel Kate Moss to turn interior designer?. Subscribe