An interior designer from London has transformed the 100ft barn near her Norfolk home into a new showroom, offering colourful furniture and furnishings inspired by her extensive travels abroad.
Emma Deterding loves colour. And pattern. And texture.
In fact, there’s not a muted tone in sight at her newly opened show room in Field Dalling, which is situated in a 100ft barn adjoining the home she shares with her Norfolk-born husband. “Everyone comes back to live in Norfolk, don’t they?” she says, knowingly. “I married Norfolk.”
Emma founded her business, Kelling Designs, in 2006 and now splits her time between Norfolk, London and the rest of the world, taking inspiration for colours, patterns and textures from far-flung destinations - which is actually not so different to how the whole business started.
“I lived in Japan from 1987 to 1990 and I came back and wanted to get a job which was flexible because I had a small child,” she explains. “I went into business with a great friend who was offering an expat service.”
At the time, Emma says the idea of a concierge service, looking after property overseas, was relatively new. Eventually the services they offered in Tokyo and Kenya grew and they landed more work on home soil.
“Gradually, over the years, more and more people asked us to look after their houses in London because they were so badly managed,” she says. “So we then started to look after houses and then from that we started to let houses, and in between the lettings we started to decorate houses.”
Decorating other people’s homes further grew the business – that is until 2007, when Emma realised that she “really hated” looking after other people’s property.
“It is the most thankless, negative business that you can be in,” she laughs, “but it is the best training for being an interior designer, decorator, whatever. You know what the builders can and can’t do because you’ve learned the hard way.”
They went on to sell the original business but Emma continued to run her own interior design studio. She says she’s worked with some high-profile clients all over the world – from city to coast and Europe to Asia. A recent project was at a huge mansion in Delhi and when we speak, over Zoom, she’s in Morocco.
Over the years, Emma has also expanded the business by adding a retail arm – KD Loves – and creating a separate home-staging business, renting out furniture and staging homes for those trying to sell their properties.
“You can’t use the furniture, you can only rent it for staging,” she explains, “but it’s phenomenally successful. Some people just don’t have the knack of staging and sharing their houses and, actually, if we move in and do it, they seem to sell much better. We can raise the asking price of a house considerably.”
Emma says she can’t put a figure on how much home-staging can and has increased the price of a home – though she says she’d “like to prove it if I could.” Most of her clients, so far, have been London-based, although she says she’s seeing more of this kind of work come to Norfolk too.
The three branches of the business work well together – in fact, Emma says it’s the “perfect circle”, creating a new way for her and her team of ten to be more sustainable.
If an interior design client is unhappy with something they’ve chosen, it gives them greater flexibility. “Rather than having to say to them ‘you chose it, you paid for it’, we can say ‘don’t worry, we can work it out’ because we can always use it. If it gets slightly damaged within the stock of our retail, we can use it in our staging – it’s actually quite a good, holistic way of using your kit.”
Interior design and staging is a much more positive business to be in, Emma says. “If you do your job well and you do your job right, people think that you’re rather marvellous,” she laughs. “People actually say ‘thank you so much, I really like my house, it’s enhancing my living’.”
Better yet, she says interior design experienced a boom during Covid because no one had anything else to spend their money on. “They just had time to look and because they were there for so long... we’ve never sold so many headboards! We were just incredibly lucky.”
In terms of design, Emma’s style is distinctive and bold, defined by using colour, textures and offbeat accents to tell personal stories – and, as a result, she’s not one to follow the latest trends.
“We never want to be on trend,” Emma says. “If we are it’s more luck than good judgement. Things should last and I don’t want people to walk in and say ‘oh, well, they did that in 2021.”
While she admits that her boldness is “not for the faint hearted”, her message is for people not to be afraid of colour.
“We’re big, bold and definitely colour,” she says. “I think that if you introduce people to it gently, they can learn to cope with it. And the reason I feel that more people don’t have more colour in their houses is actually because they’re scared of it because they don’t know how to use it. If you do know how to use it, it’s fine.”
Emma admits that although she works in both London and Norfolk, which has “a lot of very nice houses”, she put off relocating the business here. “To begin with, I never really wanted to work in Norfolk because I thought if it went wrong it would be a terrible mistake.
“But as I’ve grown more confident – and hopefully better at what I do – we’re now doing so many projects in Norfolk that it just makes sense to actually have a showroom in Norfolk.”
The new show room will opened earlier this week and will be by appointment only. “You will find sofas, chairs, beds, cushions – it’s all the things that I’ve kind of collected on my travels around the world.
“We went to Uzbekistan in April specially to buy fabrics and textiles so that we could create a range of stuff. I travelled to India a lot so most of our lampshades and such things are done with saris, that kind of thing.
“I hope it’s uplifting and I hope it’s beautiful and I hope it’s interesting. And I hope it shows that people can do different things and use colour in a really powerful way, without it overwhelming their senses.”
Visit kellingdesigns.com for more information.
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