What do Vincent van Gogh, Ronald McDonald, and Sabine Getty have in common? “I just love yellow,” gesticulates the latter in our unlikely aesthetic trio. We’re standing in Getty’s Happy Meal of an entrance hall, in the 19th-century London townhouse the 39-year-old moved into with her 35-year-old husband, Joseph, and two children, Gene, six, and Jupiter, four, in 2022. Its walls are swathed in a retina-searing paintbox yellow and Getty’s bare feet sink into the ketchupy Sinclair Till carpet. A red and yellow metal Getty Oil sign, which Joseph picked up from a gas station in Providence while studying at Brown University in 2011 (his great-grandfather, Jean Paul Getty Sr, was the famed petrol tycoon), greets you as you walk through the (you guessed it) yellow front door. “I was worried the hall might look too McDonald’s or In-N-Out Burger,” Getty says, smiling between sips of Diet Coke. “But I love it.”
Getty grew up in Geneva dreaming in daring hues. As we turn into the ground living and library space—two vast curtain-separated adjoining rooms, which were formerly “all white, with zero spirit”—she points out two vivid side tables by ’80s Memphis group designer Michele De Lucchi, flanking a colour blocked cotton sofa that used to border the bed she slept in as a child. The welcoming space is a cacophony of color, print, and texture, populated with reupholstered family heirlooms and French antique chandeliers, contemporary canvases in abstract blues by Victoria de Lesseps, and Paul Evans’s patchwork cabinetry. Getty references David Hicks, the daring British interior designer, as an enduring influence. “He was very elegant and chic but unafraid of clashing things,” she says. When the family moved in, a Hicksification commenced: ’70s-inspired smoky mirrors were installed, walls were paneled, the front room painted in what Getty coins “hardcore black” and the entire rear “hangout room” swathed in emerald velvet.
When we meet mid-morning, Getty appears cocktail party-ready in a skintight navy Flore Flore dress, and the sartorial references she drops on our ground-floor tour hint at the haute couture and vintage creations she has sequestered upstairs. The red carpet nods to Halston’s ’80s Manhattan office in Olympic Tower, while two lounge chairs inherited from Joseph’s grandfather and reupholstered in tiger stripes, plus a fringed velvet ottoman, evoke Yves Saint Laurent’s decadent studio interiors.
Before this, the Gettys lived in a Mayfair apartment that belonged to Joseph’s late grandfather, with a glorious view of Green Park. After living laterally, Sabine—whose mother is the Egyptian interior designer Karine Ratl—embraced the prospect of a four-story refurbishment, which remarkably she completed in less than six months. “I wanted each floor to be a different universe,” she explains, as we pad downstairs to the open-plan lower-ground kitchen and dining room conservatory. “I adore cinema and theatre and so for me, every room was its own stage,” she adds.
Getty recruited Anglo-American decorator and antique advisor Remy Renzullo to bring a classicism to her more ’70s and ’80s inclinations. On the expansive lower-ground floor, we are greeted not just by Toffee, a fluffy toy poodle, but a world of springlike green and white—walls, floor, and soft furnishings alike. “I was thinking of old American homes, where socialite Lee Radziwill would have lived,” Getty says, adding she is planning to spend more time in New York – the city where she and Joseph met in 2011—specifically The Plaza Hotel, their home away from home.
Formerly a “depressing beige” and dark blue, the color scheme was inspired by an abstract Colefax and Fowler Squiggle fabric, which swathes lampshades and window blinds and covers a matching rattan table set, each piece sourced over time from a London furniture fair, plus the conservatory’s dining room chairs that Getty painted white. A cabana-stripe Thibaut wallpaper and handcrafted chequerboard Emery Cie tiles, sourced from London salvage showroom Retrouvius, line the kitchen niches and a whole wall housing a fireplace. Kitchen cupboards, radiator covers, and the inner conservatory doors are painted in a bold two-tone, Getty referencing Hicks’s “lipstick edging” as an elegant decorating flourish throughout the entire house.
If Getty’s lower ground blooms with verdant all-American elegance, then the first floor has all the je ne sais quoi of a Parisian hôtel particulier. “The main inspiration was a suite at The Ritz,” she says of her and Joseph’s light-suffused bedroom, a space that leads into an en suite and sizable dressing room, conceived to be “super peaceful” in contrast to the crescendo of color downstairs.
For Getty’s “grand dame” moment, a tactile diamond-motif carpet tessellated with flowers, also from Sinclair Till, was installed underfoot and, in high French style, gilded wood paneling lined floor to ceiling in the bedroom. A single Louis XVI-style fabric by Pierre Frey upholsters everything from the bedspread to the wall lamps, bathroom curtains to a circular ottoman surrounded by wardrobes. There’s less uniformity to the family heirlooms that Getty sees from her bed: a mosaic-twinkling 1981 Memphis dressing table by Michael Graves—named after The Plaza Hotel and a wedding present from Joseph—a painting of her husband’s great-great-grandmother and a portrait of Sabine herself by Paul Benney, who was chosen to paint the official state coronation portrait for the Royal Collection in May 2023.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel lived at the Ritz Paris for 34 years and we can assume she’d approve of Getty’s adjoining dressing room and bathroom. The same bedroom upholstery runs throughout, with wall-to-wall tricolor wardrobes hiding priceless creations, such as Getty’s Schiaparelli haute couture 2015 wedding party gown (the hooded Schiaparelli creation she wore to the ceremony sits in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris), a 1992 haute couture Yves Saint Laurent dress adorned with two pink bows she bought at auction and a vintage beige Jil Sander jacket Getty’s been “wearing every day.” “Why not!” she says, as we turn into the bathroom, where sculptures by Getty’s mother-in-law and designer Domitilla Harding frame a wall leading to a marble-inlaid bath edged with twee curtains. “It’s such a vibe… The bathroom should be a great place to hang out.”
Getty’s children rule supreme on the third floor, where Willy Wonka hues abound delectably across their bedrooms and cozy book-lined reading room. “I couldn’t help myself,” she says, smiling at the Papers Paints lipstick border in “more yellow!” across each room, and the matching curtains and lounge chairs in an abstract John Stefanidis Jaisalmer fabric, pink in her daughter’s room and blue in her son’s.
As we wind down the townhouse’s grand staircase towards the entrance hall, Getty points to a series of glamorous black-and-white family photographs shot by Paul Wetherell and exuberant images lensed by Oliver Hadlee Pearch of friends wearing the zigzagging chokers and earrings she created as part of her 2017 Memphis jewelry collection for her brand Sabine G. Finally, we turn again to ponder the black walls of her living room. “We took risks. Let’s put it that way!” she says, laughing. “But to me, it’s just like a white wall… It’s a great canvas.” One thing is certain: Big Mac or Big Apple-inspired, Getty is living her life in technicolor.
Styling: Jessica Gerardi. Hair: Tomi Roppongi. Make-up: Terry Barber.