Interior designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard shares his top tips, from a Kardashian-esque gallery wall to kitchen features like Ellen Pompeo and bold Ru Paul-inspired colors.
Video version
Martin Lawrence Pollard: Hello friends. I’m Martin Lawrence Pollard, star designer. And I’m here to give you some celebrity-approved tips to make your New Year bright, cheerful and amazing. This stunning room is Kourtney Kardashian’s desk. And Kourtney likes a little Old Hollywood, a bit of edgy moment, a little bit of sparkle. In this way we created the addition of photography to make this amazing gallery wall. It’s something that is really easy to achieve at home. There are many amazing companies, such as condenast.com, that have these beautiful images. You can buy things that really resonate with you, frame them, and make this wonderful window into your decorative spirit.
So for Tommy Hilfiger and his very adventurous wife, Dee, we created this amazing polka dot room by purchasing a stencil of giant circles and placing them randomly on the walls in this crazy yellow color. You can take any design you like. It might be a circle. It might be square. And you can create your own ambiance with it. The world is your oyster, and the stencil is your pearl.
For this beautiful kitchen that I designed for Ellen Pompeo, we decided to sort of do lower cabinets mostly, which was a nice look except we didn’t have room for storage. So she decided to put a beautiful pot rack on her wall. And it became the most useful way to display and use her exquisite utensils. In this case with Elaine, I matched it to the color of the window frames, which was a kind of matte black. So think about the thing you love most about your kitchen and then choose that color and make a statement.
This is actually my living room. Unbelievable light flooded him. And I especially love my new curtains there because our living room jewelry is really how we dress up the windows. And so he inspired me to create a collection of beautiful new fabrics for the Shade Store that really allow you to make your windows shine within the space.
One of the things I’m most excited about in 2022 is that I’m creating an amazing home for RuPaul. And as you can imagine, Rowe, with his amazing larger-than-life personality, would have a larger-than-life home where, believe me, color is a must. When you want some sort of spice in your home, but don’t know which direction to go, the best place to start is to go to your local flower shop and buy a bunch of flowers, whatever color you like, and then place them in the room you’re thinking of adding color.
See how this color feels pop. Sometimes, if you look at a huge group of daffodils sitting in your living room, you’ll suddenly think, You know what? I want to live in a yellow room. And if you decide you don’t like the color, you’ll still love daffodils. And you can enjoy it for a week or so.