Tour a Fashion Insider’s Bright London Town House, Complete With an Evergreen Garden
Anyone who’s renovated a house knows delays are practically inevitable. But Caroline Sieber, a London-based fashion consultant, had an effective tactic to stay on schedule when refurbishing her Chelsea town house: A true due date. “It turns out people don’t like to argue with a pregnant woman,” she smiles, recalling how she’d show up on-site mere weeks before she gave birth to her third child. “There I was, inhaling paint fumes and tripping over cables, cheering and spurring everyone on to work quicker so that we could move in before the baby arrived.” It worked!
Sieber is a familiar face in the fashion world. She’s a former Chanel ambassador and a regular on best-dressed lists in New York and London. In the aughts, she was Emma Watson’s stylist (she brought the actress, still in her teens at the time, to her first Chanel show in 2008) and styled sittings for Vogue shoots in London. When she and her husband, Fritz von Westenholz, a London-born financier, started their family a decade ago, she shifted her exacting eye from runways to interiors. “Design is both creative and, in a way, an extension of fashion,” she says from the sitting room of the house, which dates back to the 1840s. “Just as I am drawn to a more timeless style in fashion, this also resonates with my taste in interiors.”
After the house’s meticulous renovation, Sieber can boil down her design philosophy into four simple rules:
First, spaces should be beautiful to look at but simple. “Never ordinary!” she declares. “And never clutter.”
Second, carpets should be used sparingly. “English people love carpeting bathrooms, which is baffling to me.”
Third, sitting areas should be functional and neat. “I don’t like sofas that look too comfortable or that you have to slump into.”
And finally, think light and bright. “No muddy colors or dark, heavy furniture.”
Remarkably, Sieber decorated the entire residence herself. But unlike her work as a stylist, which sees her dressing other people, she has no desire to decorate beyond her own interiors. She says she “wouldn’t dare” to do it professionally. “The house is decorated for us and to suit the way we live, the decoration is intuitive and personal. I so enjoyed doing it.”
Similar to fashion work, her design process included scrupulous research and cataloging. The window treatments in the primary bedroom copy designs in a period room at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which she photographed on her phone and saved for years until she could have them made for her own home. The curtains in the drawing room replicate those in Pauline de Rothschild’s London apartment. Inspired by Horst P. Horst portraits in archive issues of Vogue, the breakfast room is covered in Soane Britain wallpaper with window shades in the same pattern. She stalked auctions, including Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Stair Galleries, and Dorotheum in Vienna.
Sieber was born in Vienna and raised in stately homes there and in the mountains that were always picture-perfect. “They were very formal spaces, with a lot of things that we weren’t allowed to touch or come near to as children,” she says. “I wanted our house to be accessible, unforced and not too precious. Everything in it serves a purpose.”
She spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris and then enrolled in the European Business School London, where she received her MBA. Did a business degree help coordinate contractors, builders, movers, and upholsterers? “Let’s just say it has come in handy many times,” she deadpans.
She met von Westenholz not long after moving to London two decades ago, and they were married in 2013. (Her wedding dress was Chanel Haute Couture, designed by Karl Lagerfeld.) They have two girls, Electra, seven, and Cleopatra, five, and a three-year-old son called Balthazar. “We thought they sounded like superhero names,” she says. “I knew when I was six that should I have a son he would be called Balthazar. Fritz took some convincing.”
Her daughters share a room and sleep in twin canopied beds that are hung with D. Porthault pink-clover-pattern fabric. The walls are covered with a mural designed to evoke Ludwig Bemelmans drawings. “The curtains are inspired by my childhood bedroom in Vienna, and I adored them growing up,” says Sieber, adding that Bemelmans was Austrian and they read his stories in his native German.
Built on a garden crescent in a row of similar historic houses, the home is surrounded by lush greenery both in the front and back, and filled with exceptional natural light. “It’s green as far as the eye can see, which is unusual for this part of London,” Sieber says. “We get woken up by birdsong in the morning.” The Garden of Ninfa, a sublime park built in a medieval town near Rome, has long been her garden fantasy. She commissioned Milan Hajsinek and, after a few conversations, gave him free rein. She only asked for evergreens. “It was essential to consider the months when we are in London to choose flowers that would bloom while we are at home.”
Sieber’s favorite room? The study, which she calls her refuge. “The view of the garden is so pretty—and no one apart from me is allowed inside!” But she strives to keep the whole house just as peaceful. “I constantly roam the house with a mission to declutter,” she confesses. “Mess can make me uneasy!”
This London town house story appears in AD’s November issue. Never miss an issue when you subscribe to AD.
Art: Phoebe Dickinson. Paul Benney.1/16The drawing room’s green silk taffeta curtains are modeled on those in Pauline de Rothschild’s legendary London apartment. A portrait of Caroline Sieber and Fritz von Westenholz’s daughters, Cleopatra and Electra, by Phoebe Dickinson, hangs above the fireplace. Furniture includes a bespoke sofa in a Claremont stripe and an ottoman in a Le Manach print, a circa 1935 French zebrawood desk by Gouffé, and a mix of other antiques. The portrait of von Westenholz (in back corner) is by Paul Benney.
2/16A circa 1935 zebrawood desk by Gouffé stands in a corner of the drawing room.
3/16Balthazar drives his toy car in the dining room. The table is set with Herend china and Ebneter & Biel table linens. Peter Marino archival fabrics dress the window and cushion the Bonacina wicker seating. A Matisse drawing hangs on the back wall.
4/16In the breakfast room antique chairs surround a Bonacina table draped with an Ebneter & Biel cloth. Window shade and wallpaper of a Soane Britain floral.
5/16On the terrace, an early-19th-century English garden chair sits at a table draped in a cloth of Le Manach fabric.
6/16A house-shaped bookcase stands in the playroom. Le Manach’s Plumettes covers the walls and dresses the George Smith chair.
7/16An antique chair wearing a Le Manach archive print pulls up to a vintage Jansen desk in Sieber’s study.
Art: Julia Condon8/16In the primary bedroom, a bespoke bed is draped in a Claremont silk taffeta. The curtains, inspired by a period room in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are of the same fabric. Children’s portraits by Julia Condon are displayed on a Gustavian-style dresser. Swifty, a Maltipoo, stands atop an antique bench covered in green silk twill by Claremont. The Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler armchair wears pink gingham by Le Manach.
9/16In the primary bedroom, the Syrie Maugham bedside table and antique lamp were bought at auction.
10/16Sieber’s dressing room is carpeted in a Madeleine Castaing design.
11/16The primary bath is outfitted with Waterworks fixtures and tile. Soane Britain sconces; a 1940s antique table from Paris.
12/16Electra and Cleopatra’s bedroom features custom canopy beds draped with D. Porthault’s Trèfles.
13/16The children’s bath features a custom mural inspired by the artwork of Ludwig Bemelmans. Fixtures and tile by Waterworks.
14/16A guest room features a bed tented with Le Manach fabrics and dressed in D. Porthault bedding.
15/16Caroline Sieber with her children Balthazar (in a toy car from Harrods), Cleopatra, and Electra.
16/16The garden was designed by Milan Hajsinek.
