‘Sex rooms are on trend – ours are very luxurious’: Meet the interior designer to the stars
The Hollywood interior designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard is musing over the must-haves that his A-list clientele currently demand for their homes. ‘For a minute there, I became known as the Glam Room King, because everybody suddenly wanted a glam room,’ he says. It’s a trend partly driven by his work with the Kardashian-Jenners, most of whose homes he has decorated.
‘With these girls, their homes are their sets; they’re filming there every day,’ Bullard continues. ‘So we had to learn how to instal lighting that looks decorative but is also the kind of lighting you need for TV, that makes you look amazing the whole time. There’s quite a process to that; you have to have three different types of light bulbs to be able to give morning, afternoon and evening light. So you create these “glam rooms” where you’re customising to the nth degree to make people look even more beautiful. And it’s not just about make-up: it has to be a room where they can entertain, learn their scripts, watch a TV show, catch up on gossip. That’s a very fascinating thing to do.’
His next revelation is rather more unexpected. ‘We’ve had a lot of requests recently for sex rooms, which is interesting,’ he says with a raised eyebrow. ‘That seems to be the current trend. Of course, ours are very luxurious. One person, who shall go unnamed, requested a sex room that looked like a Chanel handbag, complete with quilted patent-leather walls, an ultrasuede bed platform and gold-plated sex toys.’
It’s all a far cry from Lewisham, where Bullard, now 56, was born, and Greenwich Market, where he started out with his own stall at the age of 12, buying and selling antiques and knick-knacks.
‘I convinced my dad to rent the stall for me. I’d use my pocket money to buy things I thought were pretty from other dealers and local junk shops, and I’d rearrange them on my own stall. I’d lay it all out, make it look nice, and then these bemused and amused American tourists would arrive and I’d spin a story and sell all my stuff. I did that until I was 16.’
This formative experience was, he believes, where he developed an eye for putting things together in a room; but it also funded his first dream, to become an actor. After earning enough from his stall to pay for a year and a half studying at the Lee Strasberg drama school in London, he acted in plays and adverts for a few years, supplemented his acting with a bit of modelling, and then decided at the age of 21 to move to America, where his plan was to become a Hollywood star.
‘It became shockingly obvious that instant movie-star fame wasn’t quite as easy a path to follow as I’d thought,’ he concedes. After ‘going to auditions and flailing around for a bit’, he landed a role as Eartha Kitt’s toyboy in the film I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. But his career took a different turn when the film’s producer visited Bullard’s home, ‘a tiny little place I’d decorated from the flea markets’, was impressed with the decor, and asked him to do up the production company’s offices.
‘I thought to myself, I’m going to do their office and I’m going to get a role in another movie,’ Bullard recalls; but in fact, it led to Bullard decorating the offices of another producer – Liz Heller of Capitol Records, who became a friend. It was at Heller’s wedding that he was introduced to Cheryl Tiegs, known as America’s first supermodel.
‘Cheryl had interviewed all the top interior designers in America to do her house, and by the end of the wedding, without even looking at one photograph of my work, she hired me,’ Bullard recalls. ‘Nine months later, I was on the cover of six magazines around the world and my career was born. Within a year I was working with Sigourney Weaver, Edward Norton and Christina Aguilera. Because I started with an American celebrity, my entire career took this celebrity slant – because in that world, it’s all done by recommendation.’
In the years since, his client list has grown to include countless other celebrities, including Cher, Elton John and RuPaul. Yet despite his remarkable success, it seems he still can’t quite believe his luck. ‘As a young boy from south London, I had no idea that one day I’d be having dinner with people like Elton John and Diana Ross,’ he says. ‘Their music was the soundtrack to my life when I was growing up, and suddenly I’m sitting there with the people who created it. It’s extraordinary.’
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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/sex-rooms-trend-ours-very-090000312.html