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"View Slideshow\n\nKelly Hoppen is on a roll. Having begun a business on her own at the tender age of 17, she has in recent years won a reputation as one of the top London-based designers and gathered a considerable list of high-profile clients (not to mention some very important, very low-profile ones, too). Hoppen has, it seems, established her distinctive brand of East-meets-West, pared-down opulence as one of the key looks of the moment. In a number of glamorous books she has set down her ideas about decoration, illustrating her theories with seductive photographs showing her favorites among the interiors she has created. And, as if all this weren't enough, the designer has turned her formidable and inexhaustible energies to setting up a flagship Kelly Hoppen store. Perfectly placed in the hot spot of fashion at London's Brompton Cross, it will be the first of a series of shops that will spread her vision worldwide.\n\nHoppen sees the new store as an atural extension of her work in private residences, and she is hugely committed to making the store a vibrant reflection of her design ideals: \"I love to bring together interesting things that we've sourced from all over, and I'm constantly editing, constantly refining the look,\" she explains. \"This is a place where I can try out things before using them within the confines of a narrow design brief.\"\n\nA previously dark first-floor room was transformed by the insertion of a set of skylights. It is now a family room.\n\nCuriously, the precisely ordered rooms she conceived for a house in London were the result of anything but a narrow brief. \"This was a dream job,\" says Hoppen. \"The owners, with whom I'd worked on other houses, acquired a very fine early-Victorian town house, in a central but delightfully leafy area. They told me to design anything I dreamed of.\" Now, being given a completely free hand can be a little unnerving for some designers, but not for one with Hoppen's decision and flair.\n\n\"As soon as I saw the house, I began to think of ways to make things work spatially. I worked with my usual architects at the London-based firm Barrett Lloyd Davis Associates, and we quickly got the bones of the house right, maximizing the breadth and height and the fantastic light of the main rooms and opening things up to improve the flow from one space to the next.\" A previously dark and unprepossessing first-floor room was transformed by the insertion of a set of skylights. It is now an informal family room, which flows out of the big kitchen. From here one can enjoy the best views of the elegantly geometric garden, fashioned with the help of Hoppen's collaborator, landscaper Luciano Giubbilei, as a series of outdoor rooms defined by the strictest of pleached trees\u2014a scheme that combines the order of 18th-century France and the calmness of a Japanese monastery.\n\nSimilar principles merge in the decoration of the main rooms. \"I like symmetry, which for me suggests order, and I like to create subtle contrasts of texture within a limited palette of colors,\" explains the designer. This interplay between Eastern and Western ideas is apparent everywhere: In the living room, the low sofas and the strong horizontality of shelves emphasize the scale of the room. In the sumptuous formal dining room, which is darker and more enticing in character, coarse tatami and a polished floor play off the velvet draperies and a swath of similar fabric running the length of the table. \"I'm increasingly interested in using rich, almost worn-looking velvets, simply for their wonderful tactile quality,\" says Hoppen.\n\nThis delight in textures and in the quality of materials gives the whole house a sense of luxury. In the master bedroom, which fills the top floor, a huge bed is lavishly draped in a woven alpaca, which is also used to cover an overscale headboard. Translucent doors reveal the bath, dominated by a superb limestone tub. The effect is serene and strangely opulent. \"I can never understand why people think luxury has to mean profusion, clutter and gold faucets,\" says Kelly Hoppen. \"I am not, by any means, a minimalist, but for me the greatest luxury is found in order and elegance, and in the use of the finest materials. That's perfection.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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