Bunny Delany has been in rooms most people only read about, and she has an opinion about all of them.
Forty years in, she has built a practice on a single, unfashionable belief: that a house should look like the person who lives in it, not like the person who decorated it. Her clients are chief executives, collectors, a fair number of faces you would recognise, and a royal household or two. They come to her because she tells them the truth about the sofa.
She founded Delany Design in 1986. The work has taken her to Singapore, Paris, Rome and London, through private estates, executive offices, historic restorations, hotels and clubs, and into the kind of houses that never appear in magazines because their owners prefer they didn't. She has done all of it, and she has done it twice.
What holds it together isn't a look. It's a method: live in the room before you touch it, spend the money where the hand lands, and keep one thing in every house that makes a guest ask a question.
She buys at dawn. The dealers she trusts learned this years ago — the teak man off Joo Chiat in Singapore who unlocks for her before the street is awake, the woman at Saint-Ouen who opens for no one before eight and for Bunny at six. A pair of eighteenth-century doors now hanging in a Las Vegas house came out of a shuttered palazzo near the Tiber: seen on a Tuesday, bought by Thursday, shipped in eleven weeks, and hung three inches too tall on purpose. She will tell you the three inches are the whole job.
She keeps no house of her own. She lives in hotels, and says the best-run house she ever studied was one.
Never Ordinary.
