A Creative London Flat That Feels Like a Living Art Gallery - HOUSE TOUR

Today we're stepping inside the London flat of Dominica Marland, an art dealer, homeware designer, and curator whose home reflects her love of colour, comfort, and thoughtful collecting. I'm a big, big reader and so I like to kind of have all my favourite books on display so I can think about them and pick them up whenever I need to. And I also love collecting vintage books like this one. I don't even know why I have this but I love the colour and it's a book about a woman in Venice and I used to live in Venice so it's pretty cool. After studying art history and working in the art world, Dominica set out to create something she felt was missing, a platform for discovering affordable, unique works by emerging artists. What began as a self-built website soon grew into a creative business rooted in championing new talent and helping a new generation build meaningful collections in their own homes. Here is a antique desk that I got from my parents. I would actually love to use it as a desk but I think it looks really nice when it's closed as well as open and again with the kind of old and new it's something that I keep loving exploring in the design of this flat. Today her London flat is a reflection of that same ethos, personal, layered and filled with pieces that tell a story. Join us as we stop inside Dominica's world and explore the cozy pattern-filled space she's created for herself. To watch her full episode ad-free, scan the QR code on screen or visit homeworthyplus.com for access to all of our latest episodes ad-free and to receive other exclusive membership perks. Hi Homeworthy, I'm Dominica Marland and welcome to my flat in London. I'm Alison Kenworthy, the founder of Homeworthy and on this channel we take you inside the world's most beautifully decorated homes and introduce you to the brilliant people who live there. Hi Homeworthy, I'm Liz Lang, welcome to Gray Gardens. To watch Homeworthy ad-free, visit homeworthyplus.com or scan the QR code on screen. Homeworthy Plus provides an ad-free viewing experience and exclusive content featuring our beloved hosts. Yeah, I can't wait to see, I'm so excited. And if you're looking to shop items inspired by this and other Homeworthy tastemakers, be sure to use the product links below. Hi, I'm Dominica Marland and I'm an art dealer and homeware designer and curator. This is my home in London, England. I started out in my career back in 2018 after I was at university and I found that there was no platform or website to find affordable and unique works of art. I was studying art history at the time and my background is working in the art world and I wanted to curate a platform that felt very personalised and unique for customers, you know, early 20s and 30s just moving into their first flats and homes in London to find special artworks that weren't just from museum galleries of posters and weren't just from antique shops but were from contemporary artists who were starting out in their career as well. So the website started very slowly, I built it myself, which in hindsight was probably not the best idea because it had a lot of issues along the way, but we've got to a good place with it now and we started representing more and more artists and that was a real passion of mine, seeking new talent and yeah, selling affordable art was really at the forefront of the business for a while until about four years ago when the cost of living crisis sort of started happening and a lot of the homeware brands that I was friends with or knew about, they were really struggling and people were not prioritising sort of shopping small and independent brands and they were more kind of going to the high street brands for Christmas presents or birthday presents and I wanted to, you know, highlight these talented brands and bring them onto the platform. So that's when we created De Manica Marland Home and then since then we have been designing our own homeware pieces and collection which is now at the forefront of the business. So this is the main room of the apartment and it's the kind of sitting room area. I spend a lot of time in here because I work mostly from in here but I also have a studio down in Wiltshire that we have for pretty much most of the time, but when I'm in London I work from here and I love this sofa so much. It's very comfortable but it is very low to the ground. It was a vintage sofa that I recovered in a Beata human fabric. It's a bit manic for everything else in the room but I love pattern on pattern and pattern with different things so it kind of works for me I guess. And these were off cuts from the bed head and the off-line fabric that I got made into some extra cushions that funny enough go really well on here and in the room with in terms of colour. And I love needlepoint cushions and we have these for sale on De Manica Marland and this is one of my favourites. I just think first of all the colours are great and I just like what it says and they are really popular with us and I just can't help but keep a few myself especially this one which is very very true for me. I do love hosting but I like people to leave on the dot of nine and no later. It makes me it makes me sound very boring I know but it's very true. And obviously I collect a lot of art and I like to kind of showcase it as best as I can but obviously I'm running out of space in this flat because I've got so much. And every piece is very particular and important to me and they all have sort of stories to tell. This is one that I bought quite a few years ago from the Royal Academy summer exhibition. It's a post it's one of by an artist called Francesca Colussi who collects vintage postcards and then she will go into them and embroider them and I just think and she'll kind of make it seem something different from what it was first meant to be. This one above is by one of our artists called Liat Greenberg. I bought that one from a recent drop we did because I just love I love the colours and think they're just really pleasing. My next phase of collecting is going to be collecting French embroidery framed pieces. I just think they're so beautiful and again it's got someone's name on it who I have no idea who she is but I kind of like to imagine what she would have been like and now it's nice that I can have her name on my walls. This is a piece by one of our artists Ruby Bateman who there was a larger piece in the other room. She painted that for me which was really lovely and this is something that I bought in a market in Provence this summer. I think I bought it for literally 40 euros but I absolutely love it and it might be a beginning of a painting and unfinished but I kind of just love how peaceful it is and will always treasure that. This is an artwork by Leonore Finney. I bought a collection of her work at auction because she was one of the most female surrealist artists in the 30s and 40s and I was really lucky to find a bargain with her pieces at auction and these are a set of lithographs and they are for sale but if they do get sold I'm going to be very sad that they sell. This is a really special piece by the modern British artist Augustus John and I just love the colours in this one and then in contrast I've got a new artwork by the contemporary artist Faye Weiwei that I bought from Cobb Gallery which is just down the road and what I love most about collecting art is that I can collect old and new so like an old kind of painting that was made in the 1900s sitting next to a new contemporary artwork I just love the juxtaposition and how they can both correlate with each other and tell different stories and over here this is my desk as I say when I'm in London this is where I work from otherwise I'll work from our studio in the countryside. I like to have sort of things that inspire me around but it's quite tidy right now these are some of our penny plant pots that I love putting geraniums in and I'm really into collecting geraniums and kind of looking after them I think there's something quite nice about doing that and this is a chair that I bought from Cerrado and a matching seat cushion which I think is really nice to have at a desk and the desk itself I bought on Lots Road Auctions and I just think it's quite simple because everything is a bit much in this flat in terms of pattern and colour so yeah I think it works quite well in the space this as I said is one of my favourite pieces it's a coffee table that I think I bought on Facebook Marketplace for about 20 pounds and then I recovered it in a Beate Humann fabric I love designing a coffee table it sounds weird but there's something quite cool about curating the coffee table because I do kind of think it's something that your guests see or you see when you come into the room and I love changing up and like decorating sort of like in this case I've got like a tray within one of our trays this is one of our newer trays that we have recently designed in a blue and a green that's a sample actually and then having the coasters when I have people around but yeah I just love little trinkets and this is something that my godmother made she's a garden designer and she put a beautiful leaf in this kind of pink pyrex frame and coming over here is another mantelpiece which I'm very lucky to have and again this is something that I love to decorate and change up bi-weekly usually I've got lots of cards hanging around and or like wedding invitations or postcards that mean a lot to me and I think it's quite nice to put smaller artworks this is a piece by Beatrice Hazel McCosh who is an artist that we used to represent and she gave this to me as a gift I'm a big dog person and this is a Staffordshire dog that I collected I definitely want to try and collect more of these and this is a really special piece to me it is a silk scarf actually and I for a while used to collect silk scarves and this one in particular is something my godmother designed of my parents house in the countryside because that's where her office used to be and she is a textile designer she was a very big back in the 80s called Georgina von Exdorf and this was one of her designs and I just love it because I not only think of her but I also think of my home when I see it and I'm a big big reader and so I like to kind of have all my favourite books on display so I can think about them and pick them up whenever I need to and I also love collecting vintage books like like this one I don't even know why I have this but I love I love the colour and it's a book about a woman in Venice and I used to live in Venice so it's pretty cool this is a really sweet artwork that is about to drop in our next art drop by Sean Beck they're really popular pieces and they're tiny so I think they can go into any space coming over here this is a little bar area that I have made because the flat's quite small I need a lot of storage pieces where I can get them and this is a piece that I got from Chelsea Textiles and houses a lot of random things in it including jumpers and stuff that I don't have space for in my closet and this is one of my favourite artworks that I've bought in the last few years and it's a jelly by Florence Houston again from Lindsay Ingram and I just love it and the colour goes really well with this angle poise lamp that I have and then on on the bar area I've got another one of our new Allegra trays with this time in brown and pink and then one of our quite classic yoke trays that we just did a collaboration with yoke in a lacquer and then designed this really really sweet pattern to go with it and I think it's really fun to put alongside other trays and then to have with your with your glasses and the other part of the sitting room I love this armchair that it's vintage and I got covered in a rapture and right fabric with these pillows that I really love and then here is a antique desk that I got from my parents I would actually love to use it as a desk but I think it looks really nice when it's closed as well as open and again with the kind of old and new it's something that I keep loving exploring in the design of this flat like with the new fabric of the rapture and right and this kind of antique feel and then I have this amazing vase by another one of our brands called vaseful who are based in Germany and they make these incredible vases in lots of different colours and I just think it's really a really cool statement for for a room this one's in a navy and then behind is another artwork by and over here is a bench that I found from the antique dealer called Rococo and she recovers really cool pieces in newer fabrics and this is another waterline fabric which is just great and I think it goes very well with the vibe of the other things in the apartment as well and I just I just think it's a great little piece to have in any room and hopefully I'll take it with me wherever I go and this is another artwork that is by an artist called Rose Hilton who was a modern British artist and she's very interesting because her husband was a famous artist called Roger Hilton who was very well known but he had a very bad temper and he they met at art school but he didn't allow her to paint when they got married he said you know the women should be stay in the kitchen literally he said that and then after his death she embarked again on her painting career and this was one of the paintings to come out of that time and I just think it's a really lovely piece and I try and make sure I collect artworks by female artists that are very inspiring and have interesting story to tell and finally this is an artwork of my dog Dido that I got painted of her by an artist called Sarah Bloomfield she is on holiday right now so she's not here but when she is away I like to be able to look at it and I think it's really sweet it really captures her eyes she's quite a worried dog so it really reminds me of her. I moved into this flat about two years ago and it was through a friend of mine who had owns the building and he had this flat going and asked me if I wanted to move in I said yes immediately because the flat is in the heart of Bloomsbury so we're just off Lamb's Conduit Street which has amazing restaurants and cafes and I thought it was an amazing opportunity to live in central London which I feel is so rare these days with the increasing house prices and rent going up so I moved in very quickly and it became home straight away the place was completely unfurnished and that was a really exciting thing for me to to do and decorate and yeah it's been the first time living alone which has been really really exciting as well the flat was completely unfurnished when I moved in and we're also the top floor so bringing furniture in was quite difficult but also a great challenge I originally did have a few pieces from previous homes but also I wanted to make sure I sourced a new few pieces to make it feel fresh and like a new place I am a big believer of eBay and Facebook marketplace so a lot of the pieces came from there and one of my favorite things to do is recover an upholster so a lot of pieces in here will will have been done by sort of my amazing upholsters and then a lot of pieces came from my my parents that they didn't want anymore or things that I found I obviously moved in when the homeware business just started going so a lot of the pieces are by my homeware makers and some pieces that I've designed or samples so yeah it's an eclectic mix and that hopefully shows that it's all my taste at the same time my favorite piece I think in in this room is this coffee table that I recovered in a Beata Heumann fabric and it's her Florentine fabric which really resonates with me because I love Florence it's my favorite place and it also adds a bit of sophistication and it's not too busy but it also the green ties in with the other greens in the room because I'd say that's definitely my favorite color and I don't know I think it could fit into any space and I'm sure it will come to my every home with me so this is the kitchen and it's actually a pretty big space for the size of the flat which I'm really lucky about I love cooking and any excuse to like have friends over and host is really important it came the flat came with this structure that my friend built in in the flat before I got here so it's super useful actually to put all of my sort of trinkets and bits and bobs on the shelves I am a massive glass collector and love all things glass so I like these for example come back from Venice when I lived there and these are actually some samples that we're just testing out for some new products and these are also our kind of staple Manicom Ireland home collection glasses that we made in Murano which I absolutely love and then sort of these ones are vintage Murano so super special and I was given these as a present from my mum which is very nice and then also our wine glasses that actually they sell out every time that we we have them online they come in a set of two in two different sort of styles one's called the Dida glass after my dog and then this one's the Adrian glass and they're just kind of the perfect things for hosting and have when you have people over for drinks but I can't even have enough myself because every time I put them online they they sell out I love collecting plates as you can see I always like to buy a nice plate I obviously don't have enough space for on this wall but this is a plate that we did with one of the brands that we have online called Actos that's an exclusive collaboration this was a little plate that I got recently I was on holiday in Brazil and one of the people we were on holiday with gave gave it to me as a present and I love this one especially by another one of our brands called Sveva Home and she just puts really like iconic things on the plates in sort of hand written wording I can resist anything but dessert which feels very very me because I have a massive sweet tooth and yeah other things that I love we've got one of our Allegra trays that did really have done really well for us and I think it's quite nice to be able to use it in the kitchen which is not something I thought I would use it for I thought when I designed it that I would have it for the coffee table or a bar area but I think it works really well to like hold everything on here and make it look tidy even though it's not necessarily tidy and yeah I just thought by kind of stacking artworks with books I thought it kind of gives the kitchen a bit of a more interesting element and make it feel a bit more curated which to anyone sounds a bit ridiculous but as someone who loves to collect things I think it's really nice to be able to fiddle around and rearrange things I think anyone who knows me knows that I will literally rearrange my um my space once a day at least so every time someone comes over the place it's completely different um another thing that I love and I think my favourite things in the kitchen are these Miranda Barrow mugs that I collect I try and buy one like once a year and they're just the perfect size to have a cup of tea out of um and I think once you've found a mug that serves you well for a cup of tea um nothing's better um coming over here I always love to lay a table and tonight I've actually got friends coming over so this was the perfect excuse obviously kind of table design and tablescaping is really important to me with my job and I love the opportunity to kind of put different things together like different tablecloths from different brands and new designs for example this is a Lisa Corti tablecloth that I bought this year in Rome that I'd always had my eye on and then I think it pairs really well with our Victoria lacquer placemats to make it feel a bit more kind of robust and then our kind of cutlery that we also sell online which is really fun with this tablecloth as well and then I'm very lucky in this apartment to have two mantelpieces I always dreamed of living somewhere with a mantelpiece because it's an extra place to be able to store your favourite things and artworks and it's a great focal point for a room so with this piece this is one of my favourite artworks that I have it's by an artist called Georgie Hopton who I bought from a friend who has a gallery called Lindsay Ingram and her artwork she works in collage but also these amazing kind of block prints that she makes with vegetables from her garden and the twigs that she finds in her garden I just think there's something so simple but effective about this piece I love obelisks and this is a piece that my previous boss got for me as a present for working for him I used to work a lot in the art world and for my last job before setting up my business this was one of my presents and I absolutely love it and these are the iconic candlesticks by one of my best friends who owns Bias Editions they they're really amazing and I think they kind of brighten up any space and then over here I have a little vintage table that I bought from a friend of mine called By Alice and she sources lots of amazing antiques and decorative pieces and I paired it with this marble lamp base that my mum actually bought from me from a antiques fair and I absolutely love it I think it's just so sophisticated and very grounding for any space and it's paired with this spooky lampshade and then this is another one of my favourite pieces which is kind of quite abstract for my taste but it's by an artist called Carolina Mezzaralli and she designed a costume for the National Ballet with her husband Conrad Shawcross and this was a remnant of the fabric for the ballet costumes and I'm really interested in artists who collaborate together um through through marriages and things and yeah this is just a really special piece to me it also glows in the dark which is pretty cool. I work from home so making sure the place feels as inspiring as possible is really important to me and I always like to get new ideas from the pieces around me whether it's like a print or an artwork or a colourway so I kind of try and decorate my flat with pieces that inspire me every day but also are nice pieces to have around and that everything has a story to tell I always think that's important I mean you'll you'll see it's quite a lot going on but every piece has a really important um meaning to me and this year especially I'm trying to be very much more considered in my choices and with the things that I have around um so yes it's all very nice to have an inspiring kind of place to work from. So this is my bedroom and um I'd say it's my favourite room in my very small flat um because um I'm I love sleeping as quite a lot of people do and I just like to spend a lot of time in bed and um one of my main things was is to always make my bed feel like a hotel bed um because I think that makes it feel so enticing so I'm big on linen and I collect linen this is I bought these two cushions from a market in Provence which I absolutely love they've got someone's initials on them and I kind of love that I think about who that might be when I go to bed at night and this is a really really sweet cushion that's actually for sale on my website by Volga Linen and they do these really really sweet sort of mini cushions that you can embroider in any colour or any text and I just think they're really nice presents and for babies and I'm actually giving one to my niece for her first birthday with her name on it so I just think they're really nice and then just to go into a bit more detail these are also from Volga Linen and they've also got a D on them and you can put any other initial on them and these are just a really lovely linen that are very durable and it's yeah Volga Linen is a really lovely company my quilt is one of my favourite pieces actually and that I'd definitely take if I could save anything from a fire it's by Salveston Graham and Yoke who we also did a collaboration with and it's just so cosy and then I've got this matching water bottle which in the winter is used five times a day no no lie I I've always got like a few trinkets on my bedside table I love collecting Janori pieces I was recently given this vintage Janori trinket and then this one with my name on it and I just think they're really nice to store by your bed and I've got these lovely lampshades by Alice Palmer and I think they just add a bit of warmth to to the room because it's not a hugely warm paint colour but it is kind of a demure style so I think they they tie in very nicely with the I have a little sort of kind of skincare set up here I'm really really into skincare as you might might tell from here and I love it's one of my favourite things to do is just kind of sit here and fiddle around with all my my new kind of things that I'm testing that I share to followers and things like that so I love that this is an artwork that I really love it's one of the first pieces that I bought by one of our artists online called Ruby Bateman and there's something just sort of quite peaceful about it and I always think that the figure's sort of in a dream that's why it's quite nice to have in the bedroom and it's a big enough piece for this wall and I was kind of thinking about framing it but actually it's sort of quite nice unframed and yeah I really really love this piece um one of my other favourite things in this apartment is my pink chaise longue amazingly it kind of just goes perfectly in the space that it was in and with these kind of twirl pink curtains that were not for this space at all they were from another house but I kind of made it work they're completely the wrong wrong height but a nice accident that they went really well with the chaise longue and I've kind of lent into the whole pink vibe especially with this artwork by one of our other artists Tasha France it's an abstract piece and she very kindly gave this one to me which which I really love I did made this headboard when I moved into this flat I knew I really wanted a nice sort of princessy headboard to make me feel again like I'm in a hotel and the fabric is from Ottoline who is a friend of mine and I wanted to find just a sample of fabric I didn't want anything too fancy so I found this sample that she was selling and it's worked really well and these pictures that I've got three across across the headboard and I found them in a market in Florence about two years ago and I got them reframed in these frames I think this is a yerbridge green from Farenboe which I love when I'm talking to my friends or clients about how to decorate a home I always think starting with the artworks on your wall is one of the most important things you can do because if you have a plain wall and you put an artwork on it it immediately refreshes a space and I always think one collects a lot of prints and unframe things and I think the first step is to frame your artworks and put them on the wall and it can just make a place feel very homely instantly and like it's been lived in so in my hallway this is the first thing that people see when they come into the flat and this is a little nook this is a vintage table that I found for literally 25 pounds and then a old Matilda Goad lamp with liberty that she did for liberty and then this is a really beautiful again modern british piece by a female artist called Jennifer Durant and I think it's just really cool in like 60s and has all my favourite colours on it so it's um a really nice piece to walk into every day and then in the hallway we have these jam lampshades which give a really nice light out it feels very warm when you come in rather than like a stark lighting and yeah I love those and this is a very small little but very important room in in the flat which is my very hectic closet that has definitely is not enough space but I've tried to make it work with what we've got I'm very into fashion and clothes and it's definitely like a huge part of my personality so collecting clothes is almost like collecting homeware for me I just can't can't not I can't resist yeah a few of my favourite things are like this J.W Anderson bag um this kind of dress I love I love a cool shirt I love gold shoes funnily enough I don't know why um these ones are from Bowdoin um and then also these really cool ones from Loeffler and Randall and I also love headbands as well so there's a lot of headbands in here there's a lot of shoes a lot of bags but yeah it's crazy and these ones are some really cool Mary Janes that I just bought we just did um a pop-up at Flabulous and I love their shoes so much so yeah this is my small but very chaotic closet this flat is um really special to me because it was the first place I've lived alone and it is such a home to me but I definitely feel like it's a launch pad for other projects that I'd like to do I can't wait to do a renovation soon and this has given me so many ideas of how I like to live what features I like to be around and I just love love being in here and will always see this as my one of my favourite homes that I've ever lived in Homeworthy it was so nice showing you around see you soon thanks for watching be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content shopping guides and so much more