Launched earlier this year, Ton is a new London-based interiors magazine that has quickly earned a cult following for its distinctive take on decor and its mission to spotlight “homes that have something to say.” (The brains behind the project are design dealer and Vogue columnist Jermaine Gallacher, Dazed and AnOther’s digital editorial director Ted Stansfield, and art director Rory Gleeson.) Here, the makers of Ton share a story that takes a peek inside the London apartment of decorators Benedict Foley and Daniel Slowik—an extract from their second issue, out now.
Most couples know that, when it comes to interiors, there’s really only one decision-maker. But what happens when both halves wear the proverbial trousers? Such is the case with Daniel Slowik and Benedict Foley—both decorators and antique dealers, both different, both brilliant. “We compromise,” Daniel barely has time to finish before Benedict jumps in: “Not compromise! I prefer to say we triumph at negotiation.”
And their London flat, a petite ground-floor pied-à-terre in an 1830s house in De Beauvoir Town, is a testament to these triumphs—and it certainly doesn’t feel like a compromise of any sort. Daniel bought the apartment 20 years ago (“long before a coffee cost £4 in the local deli”) and it’s had various guises since. This most recent phase began—no surprises—not long after the couple met. “The light and space here have always been good,” says Benedict, explaining how, happily, nobody has ever messed around with the Regency floorplan, “but I remember in those early days thinking that it could do with some slight redecoration,” he laughs. “Cut to nine years later...”
It’s been a mission, they say, to fashion it from its last iteration—“think 1970s Terence Conran”—to the quietly urbane bolthole it is today. It doesn’t help that both parties are enormously busy. The idea is that the couple spend half their time here, the other half in their rented Suffolk cottage, though the reality is somewhat less straightforward. When we speak, both Daniel and Benedict have spent the last week hotel-hopping (alas, they tell me, not for fun). “Being a good decorator involves being a good listener,” Daniel explains, “and that means being there.”
His style, informed by the two decades he spent at Sibyl Colefax John Fowler, is in the Nancy Lancaster vein of English couture: texture-rich, lavishly layered, heavy on the handmade. Benedict, meanwhile, is an expert colorist, a dab hand with print who knows all about decorative drama. Both are thoroughly referential and impressively informed (a conversation with them can hop from Belgian tapestries to Cecil Beaton by way of Yes Minister in a matter of moments). Both have strong opinions about taste and style. Has that made things tricky? Please. “What matters is that our standards are the same,” Daniel says, “the way we place such high value on finishes, on specialist techniques, on proper craftsmanship, on beautiful things.”
Benedict, who some may know through his dealing and frame-making business, A. Prin, describes how they approached their shared project as “the littlest of black dresses—something small but perfectly formed.” “When we were thinking about this place, I was really interested in—don’t laugh!—Versailles,” he continues. “I don’t mean in a Hall of Mirrors, Stendhal syndrome-y way. Instead, I was looking at those amazing small rooms—the ones Madame de Pompadour ended up ruling France from,” tucked away inside the palace and filled with exquisitely made things. “They are the ultimate proof that small need not be uninteresting.”
Of course, the decorator’s job is not simply frills and fripperies, “it’s about the logistics of space,” says Daniel. Here, that meant viewing the rooms not just as separate entities but within the context of the others. Take the entrance hall, painted in a Daniel-mixed shade of brown (archly dubbed “Goose Poo”). “It does this fascinating thing of compressing you as you enter until you see the brightness of the sitting room, at which point it brightens, moving you into the larger space beyond. There’s a real sense of arrival,” says Benedict. That transition is something that Daniel feels is of the utmost importance: “Rooms don’t exist on their own.”
That said, each one here does have its own, discrete mise-en-scène—a fundamental pillar of decorating, naturally, but one expressed here in the most ravishing detail. “It’s that couture thing,” says Daniel. “It’s not about what you cover a sofa in, it’s how that fabric is cut, how it’s sewn, what the finish is that will make the difference.” The linen they used to upholster their sofa—in a cloud-like gossamer off-white—is far from the most expensive, but it’s been handled exquisitely. It helps, of course, that the sofa itself is very fine indeed, created to their own design based on the one Nancy Lancaster had at Ditchley, only with arms reworked so as not to block any light from the window. “My god—the conversations we had about that sofa... ” sighs Benedict.
They were worth it, as were countless others about what went where, which room the bed should be in — and the rest. Finishing this place (as much as a pair of incorrigible decorators can ever finish) has been less a process of addition than redaction—trying, seeing, trying again, taking things away. The paintings have been chosen “by a process of elimination,” for instance. Largely all black and white, each has been hung as an exercise in light, shadow, reflection, and absorption as well as for any more straightforward aesthetic considerations. Just as a looking glass can play with space, so a picture can—not least, as Benedict says, “There are only so many times you can push the mirror button.”
Decorating to a point of such detail, without making something feel overdone is certainly clever, but what is particularly canny about this flat is how full of things it is, yet—Tardis-like—it absorbs them without complaint. That’s not to say it’s cluttered—far from it. Daniel and Benedict have no truck with mess and muddle. Instead, theirs is a well-edited and, in Daniel’s words, “layered” selection of the objects of affection that have caught their gimlet eyes, from the serpentine radiator grilles he found at a fair in Parma to a painting by Francis Cyril Rose, a protegé of Gertrude Stein, that once belonged to Beaton and which Benedict unearthed, spattered in bird droppings, after it had been discarded in a Sussex barn.
As ever, though, the real lesson lies in buying things you love. Benedict mentions a piece of 19th-century Florentine silk he and Daniel bought together in the earliest days of their courtship “as a flirtation.” Today, the painted and embroidered piece makes up their bedroom blind, its gilt threads occasionally sparking in the half-light. It’s a reminder that, ultimately, for all its decorative considerations, this flat is “the story of us.” A triumph indeed.