Old Town Pimlico Road
For 60 years, Pimlico Road has been London’s center for interior design and furniture.
Today's scene of aesthetes and craftpeople dipping in and out of boutiques like Jamb, an exhaustive collection of antique fireplaces and mantels curated by Will Fisher and Charlotte Freemantle, has largely remained unchanged since 1970s, when when legendary figures like Jacques Grange and Jaime Parladé haunted the strip during the heyday of "English countryside chic."
The famed design district is where venerated showroom-slash-shops like Howe and Soane pioneered a new concept: stock something old (antique Victorian washstands) and stock something new (custom-designed bar stools). That oh-so British sense of mixing and matching has kept Pimlico from ever getting too dusty.
The Pimlico Road Design District is also an interiors incubator for once-in-a-generation talent, notably, Robert Kime, who died last year at the age of 76. Earlier this month, a Dreweatts auction of treasures picked up from the "titan of the design's" illustrious 30-year career, which saw Kime rise from an shopowner on Pimlico Road to the decorator of choice for King Charles, drew sales eight times higher than estimated.
As home curator behind royal residences like Highgrove House (which has now been inherited by Prince William, the new Prince of Wales) and Clarence House (home to King Charles III and Queen Camilla for almost 20 years), Kime amassed quite the trove — an ancient Athenian kylix, enormous Irish elk entlers dating back to Pleistocene period, Ming Dynasty-era Cizhou pottery vases, a silk glove once fitted to King Charles I.
Top of the lot? “Portrait of a Man With Pickaxe and a Spade in a Landscape,” an Elizabethan-era oil painting "sold to a U.S. buyer on the telephone for 500,200 pounds against an estimate of up to 15,000 pounds," reports WWD.
Roses Are Read
With not one, but two shops on Pimlico Road, Rose Uniacke, a tastemaking talisman known as the “queen of serene,” is a designer of a certain brand of rarified cool.
Her boutiques are windows into her elevated sense of antiquity (items like an oak wine plinth from Belgium or Pierre Jeanneret chairs once used by Panjab University), color (see the Rose Uniacke Paint range) and fabrics (try resisting those curtains that elegantly puddle on hardwood floors).
