It’s hard to keep pace with design polymath Jermaine Gallacher. One moment, he’s holding court at a snug table in Bistro Freddie, a hip Shoreditch restaurant he decorated. The next, he’s cracking open a beer at the South Bermondsey studio of metalworker Barnaby Lewis before zipping over to visit glassblower Miranda Keyes at her nearby live-work space. All the while, he talks fast, enthusiastically hopscotching among subjects, from Charles and Maggie Jencks’s postmodern mansion, the Cosmic House (“it’s high art, academic, and unashamedly fun all at once”), to raves—like the party he threw at Barts the Great church in November to launch the second issue of Ton, an irreverent new magazine he started with two friends.
But a recent project, arguably his most ambitious yet, has forced him to slow down. “It’s my first house,” Gallacher says of the Grade II–listed home in London’s Clerkenwell neighborhood that he designed for an artist friend eager “to take a risk.” When they began working on the place, a four-story Georgian gem dating from 1830, it needed a little TLC—floors, windows, and several walls had to be restored. Along the way, they uncovered a stenciled pattern in toffee hues that set the moody palette. With the help of decorative painting specialists at Rag Arts, they restored that motif in the stairwell (Gallacher likes to call it “nicotine yellow”) and created a similarly weathered-looking wall finish in the main sitting room. Elsewhere, they collaborated with Francesca’s Paints on custom colors: khaki green for another sitting room and oxblood for the bedroom. “It’s a dark house,” Gallacher notes. “But proper old London houses are dark.”
