“My favorite part of the design process is the very beginning, when I’m working out the room layouts,” says British decorator and design journalist Rita Konig. “I love that moment with the pencil: All things are possible.” Over the years, she’s taken pencil to paper three times as she’s evolved the layout and decor of her own London flat, which she shares with her daughter, Margot, and “rather naughty dog,” Eddie. Konig’s is a style that’s layered and warm, charming but never saccharine, sure-handed without taking itself too seriously, and respectful of the past but never confined by it.
Each time Konig renovated, she considered picking up and moving elsewhere, but ended up deciding to stay put. “I love the high ceilings. I love coming in through a garden,” she says. “Every window you look out of, you look at green. It has this lovely west light and it has these big grand rooms and I found it very hard to find that again.”
In a little study Konig tucked in by the garden, her Terry small paisley fabric for Schumacher cozies the gallery walls. Her midcentury desk and chair are positioned for views outside.
During her most recent update, Konig gave herself permission to finally indulge in a canopied four-poster bed à la David Hicks, Veere Grenney, and Billy Baldwin. But what makes it feel like home is not so much the grand gestures as the things collected over time that have meaning, she believes. “What I was trying to convey was a feeling of a place being collected, rather than being decorated and propped. I like possessions, not props,” she says. “I think very often the incidental is where the magic lies in a room.”
Konig’s home makes her feel calm and makes her happy. In the end, she says, “I think that’s really what a house should deliver—somewhere that you’re happy to be.”
In Konig’s “grown-up” bedroom, luxurious curtains cocoon her bed, while Schumacher’s Serena Garland, designed by Konig, climbs the walls.
