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Rose Uniacke has crafted lush, calming spaces for the likes of Jo Malone and Victoria and David Beckham, but it’s her own soulful abode in London’s stately Pimlico neighborhood that garners the well-deserved spotlight in Rose Uniacke at Home, her new limited edition book debuting October 26. When her publisher, Rizzoli, first approached Uniacke about a book, “it just seemed like it made sense to focus on my own home before anything else,” she tells AD PRO. “I had a lot of materials and photographs available and the project was of a reasonable scale.”
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It is also a house with a remarkable past. A brick-clad structure that stood out amid the surrounding swath of stucco, it was built in 1860 by George Morgan as the residence and studio of Scottish high-society portrait artist James Rannie Swinton. By 1925 it had morphed into the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, a dynamic printmaking hub. Despite the damage inflicted upon it during World War II, Uniacke and her husband—film producer David Heyman—were so captivated by the neglected property that they decided to buy it, transforming it into a house that balanced a respect for history with contemporary ease.
Rose Uniacke at Home offers an intimate look inside Uniacke’s thoughtful, carefully layered design process over the course of the site’s three-and-a-half-year revamp, for which she also sought out architectural insight from Antwerp designer Vincent Van Duysen and gardening expertise from London landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith.
By first stripping the house down to its rawest form, Uniacke was able to make the most of the home’s immense volume and existing architectural features. From there, the final look came together through a series of enchanting interventions: Canvas walls and a 17th-century Mughal rug in the study, and circa 1900, straw-woven Orkney chairs beside the basement pool—to note just a few examples.
The book, which has been produced in a small run and comes wrapped in lush wool fabric, features ethereal photographs shot by legendary photographer François Halard. His images capture Uniacke’s penchant for understated tranquility, each one highlighting a significant level of humanistic detail. The volume also contains 23 jaw-dropping gatefolds, nearly double the number of a typical book of this size. Uniacke’s rooms look comfortable and lived-in, exuding a sense of warmth that is heightened by the designer’s own words.
The AD100 designer admits she was “challenged to put my thoughts down on paper,” but the result is akin to an informal but enlightening conversation, with Uniacke revisiting her journey to share instincts and inspirations. Through these musings, readers learn about her reverence for empty space above a fireplace and discover quiet, nuanced moments in arches, shadows cast by rippled glass lanterns, and symmetric cushion mirrors.
One of the house’s highlights is the plant-laden winter garden, which once served as Swinton’s gallery. Uniacke considers the day the construction team removed its Victorian dome as a turning point in the project: “It was just incredible how the proportions utterly changed,” she says. “It was a wonderful moment because it became clear that the room could become something completely different. We’ve got all the original rafters showing now and it creates the feeling of being outside.”
Flaunting a granite Ugo Rondinone sculpture, a 19th-century marble fountain, and fish-scale glass roof (a hallmark of greenhouses from the era), the winter garden hints at the interplay of old and new that is found throughout the home. English furniture from the 1800s, for example, anchors the house, but the placement of, say, a George Nakashima lamp, a Gerhard Richter painting, or Kaare Klint dining chairs is just as intentional.
Uniacke was eager to preserve as much of the original building as possible, choosing to restore plasterwork in the old ballroom and moldings in the drawing room rather than create it anew. After uncovering a remnant of stone in a hallway wall, she spent much time “trawling around London looking at cantilevered stone staircases before we started the design work,” she points out, “because that needed to represent the period and how it could have been.”
Although there is indeed a “certain trepidation,” as she puts it, in exposing this private lair in print, the designer says that Rose Uniacke at Home is ultimately a demonstration of her work. “I love the idea of showing the home in this complete way. The idea that someone might have my book on their coffee table is a lovely thing,” she says. She enjoyed the writing process so much, Uniacke is already putting together another volume—this time exploring projects farther afield.
