Inside Harris Reed’s Fantastical London Home (original) (raw)

[door opening]

Hi AD, it's Harris Reed.

And my biggest dream is literally coming true.

Welcome to my home. [bright music]

So we are in our, I call it the salon.

It's basically a living room

that also has a dining room in it.

Really the room we do everything in.

This apartment, when we saw it,

looked nothing like this whatsoever.

It used to be a part of this incredible manor block

that has been split over the years and years

into different apartments.

And when we walked in, it just had so much history

and so much potential.

And as someone who makes dresses and hats for a living,

this took my creativity,

and also my patience to a whole new level.

We worked with my godfather, who owns Four Corners.

And then for the interior design,

we worked with Clementine Studios.

I came with so many ideas.

My husband came with so many ideas.

So it was a really collaborative process

and very, very hands-on.

All the walls are hand-embroidered

with the amazing company Fromental.

And then it lent itself into a really wacky art.

All the art in this room is from Chilean artists,

'cause my husband's Chilean.

So for me, it was really important

to bring a bit of his home into here.

It's also a beautiful way of bringing in color to the space.

We have an insane ceiling above us.

And the story with the ceiling, growing up in Arizona,

I remember I used to always just stare at the ceiling,

dreaming of a better place.

And so, every time I ever create, I always look up.

So I always knew when we bought our first place,

I wanted a really crazy ceiling

to really symbolize hope and creativity.

These insane wall lights are about two and a half meters

by two meters.

They're vintage, 1950s Italian wall sconces

that were from an old cinema in Paris.

My wonderful husband told me, he's like,

Babe, where are these gonna go?

And this is gonna eat up the whole room.

And you know what? They're fabulous!

They can just, you can see through.

The key thing with this house is just having a safe,

queer, fun place.

And England is very gray.

So things like these objects make me really, really happy.

Fireplace. This is my number one thing.

The whole room is based around this.

It's from Renaissance London.

I always have this vision of me having martinis

with a fabulous fireplace.

We put plants in front of it

because I don't know how you turn it on,

so right now, it's kind of a garden.

This for me was my dream sofa,

an original Mario Bellini B&B Italia sofa.

This is kind of my baby and my angel.

And even though I'm crawling on it,

I don't really let anyone sit on it right now,

but it's so nice.

And as someone who knows what I do, I love velvet.

It's like, it's just delicious.

It's just so yummy and it's so fabulous.

[upbeat music]

So we're gonna go into the hallway.

Fun fact is why the house I think sat for about a year

with no one buying it, because you have this.

This is the main staircase of the building.

And it was actually quite an eyesore before,

'cause it was just like this really stark white, very low.

And I mean I still now have to duck, which is hysterical,

because everyone's like,

You bought a house that you literally have to duck

to be in?

Regina at Studio Clementine knocked it outta the park.

We had Loughran Riley do this insane branches

covered in roses that kind of completely climbs the space

and climbs onto this wall.

We've also put all of our wedding pictures and photos

that hold meaning to us on this wall.

We sleep in here.

And every morning I wake up,

the first thing I see is this hallway and all these photos

and it just brings so much love.

And then I have these insane Martin Brudnizki

And Objects lights.

I'm obsessed with lighting.

This was a very dark hallway,

so just adding these completely changed the space.

So this is the smallest room in the house,

but I just was obsessed with having this Oscar Wilde

kind of like gentleman parlors bathroom.

And so we worked with Fromental and C.P. Hart

to kind of create this little magical Harry Potter,

it's literally under the staircase space.

Obviously if you're hanging out in here,

you're using the bathroom.

But I think it's quite fun.

And who doesn't want to use the bathroom and be like,

Oh, I'm in a sexy gentleman's bar.

[bright music]

So we are in our main bedroom,

slash the only bedroom in the house.

As someone who travels a lot for work

and is always on the run,

I wanted to kind of come back into

what felt like a little cocoon.

So we worked with Fromental on this insane

hand-painted wallpaper.

What's really lovely about it

is it's like this fabulous nature scape

with these burnt oranges and fuchsias in it.

And they were really amazing about customizing it.

So they put these like hand-embroidered swallows on the wall

and they took the stencil from my husband's tattoo

and they embroidered it.

So he's always here.

And if he's not here, and then my husband always calls me

like a little bumblebee and a butterfly.

So they put these little tufted bumblebees that you see

kind of scattered throughout all the wallpaper.

And obviously we have the world's craziest chandelier.

It's by Bottega Veneziana.

I believe it was much bigger than this.

So they scaled the whole thing,

hand blew the entire thing in Murano,

and a lovely contractor, Scott,

was able to put the whole thing up

and at night the light just dances across the whole room

and you feel like you're just kind of in this trippy forest.

Before I open this door,

this was what all my friends and family laughed about

when I showed them the apartment.

They're like, It's almost too good to be true!

And then I showed them the closet,

and basically all of our clothes, everything I own,

and my husband owns, are on these two racks.

It's definitely been a bit of a challenge

as someone who's a fashion designer.

In a lot of videos, you watch people are like, they're like,

The best thing about my marriage

is like a his-and-hers closet, or a his-and-his closet.

And that's the only way to have a perfect marriage.

I think that's not true.

I think if you have this pole right here,

this is the key to a perfect marriage,

because with this stick, I can put up all of his suits,

all of his clothes, all of my clothes.

And whenever anyone has these gorgeous immaculate closets,

I'm like, Babe, who lives like that?

It's all jammed in and we all wear it.

And then you see me climb up a little ladder

with my really big pole,

and I try and grab and put new things away.

So it's good, because it pushes me

to kind of have to think my weeks through.

We make it work for us. [bright music]

This is our crazy French parlor meets Wes Anderson,

but also very English bathroom.

Having a bath felt like my biggest luxury.

And we customized it by making the marble top for it.

When I'm in the bath, I'm drinking sparkling water,

I'm reading, I'm covering the whole bathroom in candles.

So I needed a surface to place things on.

We did antique mirror for all the walls,

which this actually, anyone who has a smaller apartment,

mirroring anything really changes the whole space.

It meant that we didn't have to clean it after showering

'cause you had all the spots kind of on top of it.

We have a original Faye Wei Wei painting.

I've been obsessed with Faye Wei Wei since uni.

I framed it in an Ikea frame myself.

And what I was really proud of myself for

is I took the wallpaper from the room

and I actually stuck it behind.

So when you look at it, it gives this fun effect,

like it's built into the wall.

We did these fabulous velvet curtains

that wrap the whole space.

And when you're in here at night,

it's literally like you're cocooned away from the world.

So if my fabulous husband is running up and down

the hallways on a loud call,

I have my own little sanctuary.

[bright music]

This is my husband, Eitan, who I'm,

Nice to meet you. Finding in the kitchen.

[Eitan] This is our lovely little -

[Harris] Look at him. He's on this.

[Eitan] Cozy kitchen.

The coffee machine that he had to get.

And the fun fact about your coffee machine

is no one knows how to use it besides him.

And if you ever come over and want a coffee,

I can't help you.

It's one of those things that it's not easy to use,

but I love how not easy to use it is.

It was in our vows, actually.

It was in our vows.

Eitan makes me a coffee every morning,

which makes me sound like a diva.

But he has Sundays off.

We haven't talked about the most important elements

of the whole kitchen.

My water tap? Yeah.

Before we knew the place we were gonna get,

we knew we had to have one of these.

Because of Kendall Jenner's Architectural Digest

Open Door video.

And the way she talked about her pot filler, I was like,

I need a pot filler. Yeah.

What am I filling with this pot filler? Nothing.

But no, that's a lie.

I fill up all, I use it all the time for floral arrangements

but I don't use it very much for cooking.

We kept all the original cabinets

and they're all stainless steel

and this had this huge bank of massive cabinets

that really took up the whole space.

So the first thing that we did is we ripped all of it out

and did these kind of fun floating shelves

that visually looked really beautiful.

I think it turned out great.

And we have a lot of like knickknacks,

like from our travels and from friends.

We have like a bit from a train that was signed

by Wes Anderson,

'cause he designed one of the Belmond trains.

[Eitan] Yeah.

[Harris] That we went on a date on.

It's a painting of Harris's dad.

Yeah, my dad just watching me as I'm washing dishes

and just like eyes of disappointment.

Just kidding.

It is kind of hysterical that it's right at my eyes

as we're doing everything.

It's funny, I think everybody always ends up

in the kitchen and to have such a kind of hallway kitchen,

you still end up spending more time here

than maybe our living room.

It's great 'cause you kind of have friends on every side

that you're literally passing coffees, cocktails,

everything to,

and then I usually just sit in my And Objects

Martin Brudnizki chair and ponder life.

[upbeat music]

Come with us to the last room of the house,

which is all glass doors.

Our library, study, office, TV room, media room.

It's everything.

All my clothes are literally stored underneath the sofa

because there's no storage room.

Probably where you find us the most

besides the garden at the moment.

I think we binge watch all of our favorite shows on this TV.

It's a frame TV, yeah.

This room is also one of those things

that when we got the place,

we're like had no idea what we were gonna do.

Because there's two entry points.

Like this is the only way into the back garden,

and then behind you are the glass doors.

So it's hard to be a guest room.

It's hard to be TV room. There's a lot of natural light.

So finding ways of like curtaining off this entire wall.

It was just about creating a space that could be like,

[Eitan] It's flexible. Totally.

And super functional.

We put like - The pullout desk.

Here, so you can have a desk if we need it,

which I haven't used once.

My favorite art piece in the room is probably, okay,

it's not really an art piece, it's my favorite thing I own.

It's this signed picture from Britney Spears.

Peak Oops, I Did It Again. Signed to me.

This is if there's a fire, besides my fabulous husband,

this is what I'm grabbing to take with me.

And I think a running theme,

especially in this room, is the outdoors inside.

Like all the wallpaper from Fromental

was meant to kind of look like a stormy sky,

which is perfect for London.

And then we had these funky lights

that Porta Romana did, again,

bringing in the outside kind of indoors.

[bright music]

Outside, we had this tiny little deck

that you could barely squeeze onto.

And we extended it out,

so now you have all this amazing light

and you can see my favorite thing,

which is my big palm tree.

This really for me sold me on the house

because who gets to have a palm tree in London?

This garden did not look like this at all

when we got the place.

It was a complete swamp.

Before you had mosquitoes everywhere,

you had tons of poisonous bushes.

And Lisa Collins, who did the garden design, killed it.

And she really helped define all these spaces.

I was pumped 'cause I finally got to have a fountain.

The sound it makes is just really magical.

We spend all of our time here.

This table is full of friends at all times.

We have really wonderful furniture. Eichholtz killed it.

But when it came to the lighting of the garden,

I had no idea how much it cost

to actually put electrical into a garden.

And so all the lights are all solar

and they're all from Amazon.

At night, this entire garden illuminates.

And all my neighbors were literally were asking me like,

Who's your outdoor lighting designer?

And it's literally was just me,

obsessively shopping on my phone.

But it's really made it so magical.

And what I love about it is if I get tired of one design,

I just replace and move things around.

So at the back of the garden, this for me,

is probably one of my happiest spaces and most proud spaces.

We have our little blow up hot tub.

It's not wood, but this was a dream of mine.

Shout out to Amazon.

It literally was like, I think we can have a hot tub.

It arrived and this is where you find me every night.

I get off the Eurostar, I kick off my platform boots,

I run back here.

I pretend like I'm eating figs off my tree.

They're not ripe yet. I wish they were ripe.

My husband had so much to do with the garden

because he wanted everything

to kind of be a bit more minimal.

So all the furniture back here is from Eichholtz.

For this space,

I knew I wanted like a really wonderful sectional

and I wanted something that was really cozy and really easy,

and I have friends from all walks of life

that we just come back here and we talk the night away.

And even the couple days it's been raining,

we're still out here literally holding little umbrellas

and having deep conversations

and drinking way too many martinis.

This is my shower.

This is the biggest running joke with my contractor Scott,

because it arrived.

He was like, I think you made a mistake.

You just bought an outdoor shower.

And he was like, No, we don't do this in England.

You don't have a shower.

And I was like, Yes, we do.

And so actually, funny enough,

I haven't used the indoor shower in the past month.

I've just been showering out here.

I like, again, big bath person,

so I take all my baths in there.

But this is my shower. This is my ride or die.

This is my life. The shower.

My husband and my outdoor shower and my rod for my closet.

Those are my babies. [bright music]

Bye, AD.

Thank you for coming to our home,

and literally making this queer kid's dream come true.

I need to now go make a bunch of food for my friends

and learn how to cook, so I'll see you guys later.