When interior designer Mitch Crook was called in by the owners of a Grade II listed manor house to give its tired main bathing space a striking yet sympathetic restoration, even they didn’t envisage the most unexpected source of its elegant pieces. Busola Evans speaks to him. Photography: Oli Douglas
Patience is a virtue in no short supply for interior designer Mitch Crook. After a rare and tempting offer, thanks to his enviable contacts in the film industry, to acquire an exquisite Drummonds bathroom taken straight from the set of the flamboyant Freddie Mercury biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, he put his impulse buy in storage and braced himself for a lengthy waiting game.‘I didn’t have a project for it at the time and I didn’t know when I would,’ admits Mitch. ‘But it was too great an opportunity to pass up. I loved the story behind the bathroom and I am also a fan of Freddie so I knew I would somehow find a way to make it work.’
It was three years before the right project eventually presented itself. Mitch, the creative director behind the multidisciplinary design practice Hotel Creative, based in London’s Soho, had started work on a commanding Grade II listed, five-bedroom Queen Anne manor house set in Surrey’s rolling grassland, newly purchased by a creative couple in their fifties. The property, despite being blessed with an abundance of period features and rich, intricate detailing, was worn and called for a sensitive redesign and renovation. But it was the main bathroom the owners found particularly irksome and for which they gave a clear brief to restore to its decorative glory.
‘The colour was an uninspiring beige and the shower was way too small for them – everything was dated and needed updating,’ recalls Mitch. It was then he knew the stashed-away bathroom, the exact match of the one the late legendary Queen frontman had installed in his Kensington abode, notorious for its raucous parties and wild escapades, had possibly finally found its permanent home.Thankfully the owners needed little persuasion.
‘They were really open and had discerning taste,’ says Mitch. ‘From the other rooms in the house, it was clear they were not scared of colour. The living room, for example, is a deep yellow while the dining room is dark burgundy. So they were definitely bold in their choices.’The Drummonds bathroom came complete with everything from the deep, brass-cladded Usk bath to the Double Locky washstand and the Brora high-cistern WC. The elegant Double Derwent wall lights with the fluted shade came ready to flank the two round Tilt mirrors, infusing some old-world grandeur.
However there was an unexpected predicament. The owners, keen shower users, had one firmly on their list of requirements. ‘But in the true story of Freddie Mercury’s bathroom, a shower was not in the room,’ explains Mitch. So he faced the task of sourcing one which would meet his clients’ needs without compromising the integrity of the bathroom design.
The answer was found in the Thurso, a glass-enclosed freestanding shower with a curved skirt that acted as a striking centrepiece, with its 360 degrees view, while perfectly complementing the existing pieces.
‘It’s the biggest shower Drummonds make and was perfect for the space. We chose the antique brass which is unlacquered so it would patina over time,’ says Mitch.‘We did some renders to show what it would look like. Once the owners saw the central shower, that swung them into doing it.’
The previous bathroom was half the size and had backed onto an office so planning permission had to be sought to remove the dividing wall, which thankfully had only been added in the 1950s, and helped expand the space to a sizeable 14 x 14ft.
‘We also had to check that the floors were strong enough to handle the weight of the bath, the weight of water in the bath and then the weight of one person in the bath full of water. As a result we had to rip up the floor and strengthen it all,’ says Mitch. The flooring was replaced with Velentre Aged Oak herringbone from Ted Todd, capturing the look and the feel of the wood floor in the rest of the 1720s house.
The well-proportioned space made light work of the layout design. ‘We did multiple floorplans and it made sense to put the shower in the middle and the toilet and bidet in the corner.’ explains Mitch. ‘There was one big empty wall but the clients are collectors of fragrances from around the world so they chose to display it in an Art Deco cabinet which works really well in that space.’
The St Laurent de Gournay wallcovering, while not part of the original Freddie Mercury composition, was one the owners selected for its exhilarating, sumptuous impact on the scheme.
The design, inspired by a set of original antique panels owned by fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé, is distinct for the delicately worked renderings of exotic birds – to Western eyes at least – nestling in densely packed flowering bushes.
‘The wallpaper has 23 panels before it repeats so there is no repetition in the entire room,’ says Mitch. ‘It is all hand-painted so every time you look at the wallpaper you find something different. The ceiling was created with 23 carat gold leaf by Janet Fryer. ‘It looks amazing at night when the sun goes down and the wall lights are on over the vanity sink,’ says Mitch. A doorway which once led to the servants’ quarters has now been turned into a storage cupboard for contemporary indispensables such as toothbrush chargers to a wireless sound system.
Unsurprisingly the owners are thrilled with the finished results of the nine-month restoration – a faithful interpretation of years past designed to meet the needs of a modern-day couple and possessing what Freddie himself may describe, a kind of magic.