Meet Hollywood’s favourite interiors guru

"I saw you coming," Harry Enfield once told a succession of women as Martyn, the antique salesman who sells a fortune's worth of junk to the rich and clueless in W11. The Martyn in town with me today is a very different sort – the world's premier interior designer, in fact – and yet has more in common with Enfield's character than a name. Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Esq., first discovered a passion for antiques and curation while working a stall at Greenwich Market, upselling trinkets to unsuspecting American tourists in his early teens. He is also one of the most hilarious people I have ever interviewed.

It is that irrepressibly funny and Ab Fab-esque manner – along with a unique knack for translating a client's star power into a star home – that keeps the world’s biggest celebrities calling on him with each new property they purchase. A near-constant name in the best-of lists (AD 100, Elle Decor Top 25), Bullard has won coveted awards including, in 2010, the Andrew Martin International Interior Designer of the Year. To his portfolio of star homes, he adds high-end hotels, including (all in California) the Sands, Whitley and Four Seasons.

A dignified gentleman who speaks in a clipped, transatlantic accent – and approves of my own attempts at humour with a drawn out “that’s hilaaarious” – he is one of those rare designers whose success lies not in any signature, but rather in the lack of one.

A flick through his majestic new book, Star Style, paints a vivid picture of his chameleonic talent. From the Dutch paintings and Moroccan upholstery of Tommy Hilfiger’s home in Connecticut, to the leather chairs of Kylie Jenner’s dining room custom-dyed in shades of pink that match the tones of her lipsticks, Bullard emerges as something of a paradox: a self-effacing star designer.

By now you’ll have realised that his portfolio reads like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which is fitting for someone who grew up in a “theatrical family” and once wished to become a movie star. We meet on a grey Autumn morning, a world away from the land of Goop and Erewhon. At the Beaverbrook Townhouse, a plush hotel on Sloane Street, the designer eyes up a full English. “We don’t get that in America,” he says. Away from his trainer’s watchful eyes, he is in an indulgent mood.

“The obsession with health”, he says, used to be the biggest divider between Brits and Americans. Today though, he feels, Britain has caught onto the craze. Our two cultures have “merged together because of Instagram and TikTok”. Bullard is not a fan of the homogenous (he loves a loud print and said lockdown was like “a beige misery”). Fortunately, there is one thing that still sets his country and land of adoption apart: the humour. “Brits love being made fun of,” he says, citing TV shows like Little Britain – which famously pulls no punches.

The British art of taking the mickey served Bullard well in his teenage years, plying his trade as an amateur antiques dealer. “There was always a tale,” Bullard laughs, “I’d tell them it was the Queen’s teacup or something.” What he thought was an acting class preparing him for Hollywood turned out to be a lesson for a very different career. “It was my absolute learning process,” he says of his time at Greenwich Market. “It taught me how to curate.”

Bullard sees curation as the most important skill in the designer’s book, and his unique approach to taking things that shouldn’t work together and magically rearranging them has kept him at the top of the game for thirty years. He gleans his curatorial wisdom not from other designers, but from a writer. “Oscar Wilde,” he tells me, “said all beautiful things belong to the same age. Maybe that’s a castle etching with a glass ball from Home Depot, sitting on a tray from, you know, the Marrakesh Grand Bazaar.”

Bullard got his break when he played “Eartha Kitt’s toy boy” in the 1998 film, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. “I became friendly with the producer,” he explains, who saw what he’d done with his own place and asked if he could decorate the company office. “I said I’d do it thinking that way, they would cast me in another movie.”

What happened instead were more design commissions, including one from Liz Heller of Capitol Records, who became a friend. When Heller’s wedding planner overdosed on the eve of the big day, Bullard stepped in to rescue the event and, on the night, was introduced to “America’s first supermodel”: Cheryl Tiegs. She commissioned him on the spot; from there on, his career skyrocketed.

Back in his actor-cum-designer days, Bullard would source lamps and furniture from flea markets. Though his sources today are typically more premier, Bullard remains fond of things with a raffish edge. He hates anything too pretentious, favouring comfort above all else. In his own words: “You never want to walk into a room and see a piece of furniture that looks like you can’t sit on it and stand on it have sex on it.”

This brings us to sex rooms, which more and more clients are clamouring for. “Ours are very luxurious,” Bullard reassures me. “One of them, we designed to look like a black patent leather Chanel handbag with quilted walls and buttons.” Before spilling the beans on the client’s identity, a plate of baked beans arrives: along with scrambled eggs, breakfast tea and a full English sans black pudding. We tuck in.