I’ve gone to meet dealer-turned-decorator Adam Bray at his home in Maida Vale to discuss his latest project, an impossibly cool renovation of a flat in west London’s Trellick Tower for an artist relocating to London from the USA. Before we get stuck in, he serves an immaculate breakfast of perfectly scrambled eggs with walnut- and-raisin-studded toast and rocket-fuel coffee. An hour or so later, plates scraped clean, we’ve touched on Ernő Goldfinger, Mies van der Rohe, Angelo Donghia and Mathieu Matégot, among others. This is a man who knows his onions (and his eggs).
Forget the drab grey concrete lashed with rain that you might associate with a tower block; here you will find colourful Brutalism of the highest order. Even before you cross the threshold of the flat in question you encounter luminous Tetris-like coloured-glass panels embedded in the wall of the reception area, buttercup-yellow paint slicked on the ceiling and walls of the communal stairwell and the glossy green tiles and shiny lino floor of the corridors outside its entrance, like a glossy, pale-blue river in the sky.
‘The outside of the flat is almost as good as the inside!’ I cry in delight, pointing out all the juicy parallels between the two. ‘Well,’ Adam says after a timely pause and with eyebrows raised, ‘I tried to do something that wasn’t completely irrelevant.’ This strikes me as very him. He’s equal parts acerbic, funny and conspiratorial, and I’m already having a good time, just as the owner of the flat clearly did while decorating and furnishing it.
Impeccably designed by Goldfinger as social housing for the Greater London Council in the late 1960s, and completed in 1972, the 217 flats in the Trellick Tower have had a chequered history mirroring that of the Golborne Road and its surrounding area, with problems of drug use and antisocial behaviour exacerbated by lack of investment giving way to gentrification and rising property prices in the last 20 or so years. One constant, however, has been the views. ‘You get the whole movement of weather across London, which is sort of extraordinary,’ Adam confirms. ‘You can see a thunderstorm as it arrives and washes across the city. It’s a very contemplative flat; you have a view on both sides, which is marvellous. It’s a bit trip-alicious.’
Adam started his research by looking at how apartments by some of the masters of 20th-century concrete architecture were decorated, particularly those by Le Corbusier and Breuer, as well as houses by Goldfinger, such as his own home at 2 Willow Road in Hampstead, now owned by the National Trust. Simplicity; strong colours; everything in its place. But the flats in the Trellick were (and many still are) council housing, and inevitably the proportions are smaller than those that Adam is typically used to working with, so he has made some clever interventions to make the space feel bigger.
First off, he has run a poured resin floor throughout – upstairs and down – to keep things uniform and trick the eye. ‘It’s not bright, it’s not raspberry. It’s much more like that spatula,’ he explains, gesturing towards the kitchen implement. ‘It’s a sort of slightly hot plum.’ Up shoot those eyebrows again. Next, he’s glossed the ceilings to bounce a bit of light around, and as a homage to Donghia, whom he greatly admires. The majority of time on the project was spent getting the ceiling flat enough for the gloss to look great, with endless filling, sanding and undercoating required by a crack team of contractors led by Rob Owen-Bradley.
The result is nothing less than spectacular, in a shimmering off-white taken from his range of colours created for Chelsea institution Papers and Paints. ‘I’m sort of married to [them] because I like the period correctness,’ he explains. ‘If you do things that are period correct, it allows you to do things that are spectacularly un-period correct.’
The whole effect is quite louche and 1970s; you could throw an exceptional party here. Upstairs on the entrance floor is a neat stainless-steel catering kitchen with a fabulous palest-green Pyrolave top that Adam wanted to look almost like an Art Deco brasserie counter. ‘It’s work-y, machine-like, cleanable and easy to go away and come back to,’ he explains of the kitchen, which has astonishing views down to the Westway below through windows that slide all the way across.
A dining area with a black patent-leather bench that might look sleazy in less capable hands, a tiny loo and a utility room complete this floor before you head downstairs to three bedrooms, a bijou bathroom and a living room with a corner sofa facing a massive telly. Adam chose the smallest tub he could, but they still had to cut out half of the wall to get it in. The chequerboard floor here ‘keeps the scale small but makes it a little bit spicy’. With light streaming in from all sides into everywhere but the bathrooms, he’s gone big on spectacular curtains (with sheers beneath to diffuse any glare), in silk for each of the bedrooms and ‘these fullwidth Odeon Leicester Square’ ones in the living room, as well as in the dining room.
How would he describe the look, I ask. ‘I like calm, in-between colours, I like the sculptural quality of mid-century furniture, and I like extremely comfortable upholstery. That’s it really,’ he says, shrugging. ‘And in a flat like this, where scale is a problem, you have to pick your fights. I’d rather have an incredibly comfortable bed…’ he trails off, poring over the pictures and ever primed for an anecdote. ‘What you don’t see in that [pointing at a photo] is the most amazing bookcase I bought in a flea market in Paris that we had to drop down the side of the building outside from the kitchen – four big, hairy-arsed blokes.’ And with that imprinted on my mind, sated and amused, I leave him.
For more about Adam Bray, visit adambray.info
A version of this article appeared in the January 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
