“I just love working with Martyn. He always emphasizes high-quality materials and flawless craftsmanship to create timeless, decorative, and luxurious designs—his signature aesthetic. Our collaboration was influenced by his travels, creating windows into a world unlike any other. He is not only an outstanding interior designer and creative thinker, but also an amazing person.”
—Marie Shirin Karlsson, Creative & Managing Director, Cole & Son Design House
The secret to Martyn Lawrence Bullard’s enormous success is his rare ability to capture the essence of his celebrity clients in décor. “I refuse to have a style,” he announced during our recent Collecting Design webinar conversation. “My style is your style.”
Approaching his work much like a portrait painter, Bullard’s unwavering mission, he explained, is to ensure that his interior designs celebrate his clients’ unique personalities, tastes, and lifestyles. These clients are among the most recognized people on the planet, and his guiding light is to always make them feel at home, each in their own way. “Ultimately,” he said, “modern luxury is comfort—you want your home to be your sanctuary.” For Dee and Tommy Hilfiger’s Connecticut home, Bullard created a regal yet rustic country manor furnished with English antiques and Americana, featuring a plush, ruby red screening room with a Turkish flair. For the Beverly Hills home of Rupaul, for whom all the world’s a stage, he created an extravagant, theatrical environment with bold color schemes and dramatic silhouettes, with ample space for storing and displaying a massive fashion collection. For Kylie Jenner, he devised a youthful yet chic space with an air of 1970s glamor, accented with rosy hues that echo her famed lipsticks. For Kourtney Kardashian, he created a relaxing, neutral-toned family retreat that embraces the “less is more” spirit of mid-century modernism. These homes and others are showcased in Bullard’s new book Star Style (published by Vendome Press). which covers the last decade of his exquisite portfolio.
As for Bullard’s personal proclivities, he is drawn to the aesthetics that he encounters in Istanbul and along the Bosphorus waterway. He calls Rome “the sexiest city in the world” and London both his second home and the best resource for interior design. Paris, for him, is all about shopping at the Marché aux puces Porte de Vanves flea market, but Marrakech and Tangier are also “important sources of inspiration,” as are the markets in Cairo and the historic neighborhoods of Los Angeles, such as Brittan Heights, Bel Air, West Hollywood Hills. Bullard is the consummate world traveler, fluent in speaking design languages across styles and cultures. “When you stop being an adventurous hunter,” he declared, “your career is over.”
Bullard was born in London, the youngest in a family of six, including three older sisters. His journey into the world of design, he told us, began at age 12, in South-East London’s Greenwich Antiques Market. He would arrive early in the morning, his weekly allowance in pocket, and scour the merchandise offered by others in order to re-sell it in his own stand later in the day. This is where he learned his trade, he said, where he began “to understand the art of putting two things together by forging beauty, which is what I do for a living today.” He refers to those days as his formative design education, where he discovered the allure of English antiques—Georgian, Regency, Victorian—and the power of expertise to shape one’s taste and sophistication. His education continues today, he revealed, through Christie’s catalogs, his “bible,” studying each new issue closely every season.
At 16, Bullard decided to pursue acting and attended the Lee Strasberg Actors Studio in London before moving to LA in 1994. He went to Hollywood to become a movie star and ended up becoming the interior designer to the stars. Although, from 2011 to 2013, he starred in the hit Bravo reality series, Million Dollar Decorators, and plans for a new show are currently in the works.
Bullard’s professional ambitions pivoted after he decorated his own small apartment in a ploy to attract the attention of a producer—who ended up inviting Bullard to decorate his house. Within a year or so, Cheryl Tiegs invited him to do her Bel Air home, and the project was featured on the cover of six magazines. He never looked back. With a career now nearing the 30-year mark, Bullard has amassed an impressive array of accolades, including being named one of the world’s top 100 interior designers by Architectural Digest and receiving a permanent listing in Elle Decor’s A-List.
Bullard ’s favorite projects involve historic homes with intriguing pasts. His creativity, he explained, is fed by the legacies of those who occupied these spaces before, drawing inspiration from, in his words, “the tapestry of the life of the house.” He was drawn to his own home—a 1922 Mediterranean villa in LA that he shares with his wheaten terrier Daisy—because of its ties to the avant-garde art world of the 1960s. In those years, Bullard’s home was owned by husband-and-wife movie stars and art collectors Brooke Hayward and Dennis Hopper, who hosted a gallery space there—one that gave Roy Lichtenstein and Keith Herring their first exhibitions.
Bullard’s living room today features two screen prints of Warhol’s Sunset as a way to highlight the site’s historic connection to Abstract and Pop Art, including the fact that Hopper and Hayward’s first art acquisition was Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato). Otherwise, the décor of Bullard’s home reflects his taste for color, eclecticism, and Middle Eastern material culture, which he told us adds “mystique, exoticism, and sex appeal.”
Wallpaper plays an unusually central role in all of Bullard’s interiors. “Wallpapers,” he explained, “provide the easiest way to add a personal touch to any interior,” with the power to transform the entire experience of a home. He exploits this power quite extensively and particularly loves to install wallpaper on ceilings. His collection of wallpaper designs for UK-based Cole & Son—known since the 19th-century for its highly refined, traditional black-printing process—reflects his admiration for another wallpaper devotee, his hero, William Morris. From early childhood, Bullard noted, he has had a strong attraction to Morris’ Victorian-era patterns, which he first encountered in his family’s home while growing up.
Among the most rewarding aspects of his work, Bullard shared, is cultivating long-term relationships with his clients, working with them across multiple homes over many years. “The language you develop with your regular client,” he said, “is priceless.” One prime example is Stable Road Estate, the Maui beach house of investor and philanthropist Ed Freedman, with whom Bullard had worked before. The heavenly setting, a destination famed for kitesurfing, inspired Bullard to devise a tropical scheme tempered with a Japanese-style serenity. When you work on several houses for the same client, Bullard told us, you begin to speak the same language; a trust develops, which gives the designer a sense of freedom.
Another rewarding aspect of Bullard’s work, he said, is working with clients who have a great deal of experience collaborating with interior designers and building art and design collections. They possess a level of self-assurance that brings an ease to the project. The LA home of David Furnish and Elton John is the ultimate example. Both Furnish and John, he said, are men of great taste who love to see their design sensibility fully expressed. All of their homes are filled with carefully curated art collections.
For the couple’s classic country house in England, Bullard’s interiors expressed a very traditional idiom. But for their mid-century home in LA’s Trousdale Estates neighborhood, Bullard created a comfortable family home that allows the art collection to shine while also integrating idiosyncratic personal effects and lots of books. Bullard’s vast knowledge of design and visual culture fuels his courage and confidence as an interior designer, which in turn fuels his tremendous success. It allows him to paint each client’s portrait, seemingly effortlessly, through the furniture, accents, color palettes, and textures he curates for them. His style is whatever it needs to be to make his clients feel like their home is their sanctuary.
This article was published today in Forum Magazine by Design Miami. All photos courtesy of Martyn Lawrence Bullard, appear in his new book Star Style.
