Meet Rose Uniacke: ‘an expert in making history liveable’

Sitting in her London office, Rose Uniacke humbly describes her job as ‘part-dealer and part-designer’. In reality, though, that’s only half the picture.

Since she launched her eponymous company just 16 years ago, it’s evolved into a small empire that encompasses an antique and modern furniture gallery, an interior and architectural design office, and a production studio that has created countless tables, chairs, lights, ceramics, textiles and homewares. She also has no fewer than three showrooms on the capital’s Pimlico Road — home to Britain’s most distinguished names in the decorators’ trade — and an army of 75 staff.

Uniacke’s success is thanks to the demand for her unique touch, which seamlessly pairs period design with modern elements, creating environments with an emphasis on harmony and balance. The Wall Street Journal recently described her as ‘an expert in making history liveable’.

‘I’m interested in creating spaces in which you feel able to do the things you might want to do. I’m not so interested in shock,’ she explains. ‘There’s a tranquillity, a comfort, and a feeling of possibility in the work that I do.

‘I’m often guided by buildings, listening to what they might need and how they are going to function. And I am passionate about furniture from across the centuries.’

As a child, Uniacke was constantly drawing, painting and sewing, as well as reorganising her bedroom. ‘I always felt the space in which we live and how we surround ourselves was important,’ she says. ‘I learnt early on that you can change the way you feel by changing the way your room is.’

In the 1970s, her mother, the antiques dealer Hilary Batstone, added a light-filled modern extension to the family home, a converted 17th-century almshouse in Oxfordshire. ‘The way you moved through the old to the new was very beautifully done. I’ll never forget it,’ she says.

After completing a philosophy degree at University College London, Uniacke began an apprenticeship at a restoration workshop near her home — training as a furniture restorer, gilder and specialist in paint and lacquer. The knowledge she acquired would become the foundation of her tactile approach to working.

‘They restored painted furniture, lacquer and ceramics, working at the highest level,’ she says. ‘I’m always looking at things from all aspects. How is this going to be made? What period are we dealing with? What are we trying to do? And now, in our practice, we have lots of experts, restorers and makers.’

During the 1990s, Uniacke established her own restoration studio. She then relocated to a chateau near Toulouse, searching local markets for antiques and textiles to breathe new life into the building. In 1997, she returned to London, working in her mother’s shop on Pimlico Road, initially as a buyer, then as a designer, as well as pitching in with decorating jobs.

Within a few years, her services were in such demand that she set up her own practice and began designing homes, offices and yachts for clients such as Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender, Jason Statham and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, David and Victoria Beckham, Jochen Zeitz, Peter Morgan, and David and Monica Zwirner.

Part of her work entails scouring the sales of the major auction houses on behalf of clients. ‘We have researchers who make sure that they are buying the right pieces at the right prices,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes people want their projects to be more decorative, or sometimes they want to build a collection — and that’s thrilling, and an important part of what we’re doing.’

In 2007, Uniacke took on what is arguably her best-known project: the family home she shares with her husband, David Heyman, the British film producer behind Barbie and all of the Harry Potter movies.

The couple bought the imposing Victorian property, on the corner of a square of stuccoed terraces in Pimlico, three years after first visiting it — having initially convinced themselves it was too much of an undertaking.

Built in 1860 for the Scottish society portraitist James Rannie Swinton, with a huge, north-facing studio, the house became the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in 1925. It had been badly damaged by German bombs during the Second World War and neglected ever since.

Working with the architect Vincent Van Duysen and the garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith, Uniacke set about transforming it into a place of repose. The first step was to restore its period features: the ballroom’s intricate plasterwork alone, caked in decades of paint, took three months to refurbish.

Once the space was primed, like a canvas, Uniacke gradually reimagined each room for modern family life (the couple have five children). She filled the space with her collection of ancient marble idols and columns; reclaimed metal fixtures; antique stone and wood fittings; 20th-century furniture by Diego Giacometti, Kaare Klint and Marcel Breuer; and contemporary art by Gerhard Richter, Yayoi Kusama and Richard Prince. ‘It was an exciting journey, but a long one, respecting the building’s bones and finding a way to let it have a new life,’ she says.

Swinton’s former paint closet was converted into a walk-in refrigerator and the old stable building was turned into a guesthouse. The ballroom became the couple’s study: a playful mix of formal and practical, with immense volume, brilliant light and splashes of exquisite colour, which has been shared so many times on social media that it has spawned a generation of imitations.

Once the project was finally complete, photographer François Halard shot the house for the monograph Rose Uniacke at Home, published in 2021 by Rizzoli. This was followed by Rose Uniacke at Work in 2023, which details several of her other projects, ranging from a West End apartment used by a gallery owner as a bolthole for visiting artists, to a 1930s East Hampton beach-house designed to accommodate the owner’s collection of post-war Japanese abstract art.

Uniacke might be working on eight or so projects at any given time, personally overseeing every element from conception to completion, and around half of her business now comes from the US.

In March 2025, she completed one of her most ambitious undertakings to date: San Vicente West Village, the New York offshoot of Jeff Klein’s celebrated Los Angeles-based private members’ clubs, San Vicente Bungalows and San Vicente Santa Monica. ‘I was given lots of freedom with this one,’ says Uniacke. ‘It has bedrooms, several restaurants, a cinema — so it’s very different from a residential project, but I had great fun.’

Uniacke reimagined the building — which in 1912 sheltered the surviving crew and passengers from the Titanic — with antique Italian commodes, vintage Danish sofas covered in creamy linens, mohairs and velvets, and side tables and lamps from her own range of editions. A walnut-clad listening lounge completed her vision.

Back in London, Uniacke is preparing her upcoming exhibition, Letting in the Light: the Furniture of Hope and Tranquillity, for her booth at PAD London — the design fair that takes place in Mayfair, 14-19 October, alongside Frieze Masters. The show centres on the Scandinavian concept of the sportstuga, or sports cabin (a utopian holiday home set in a healing environment). Uniacke is showcasing a pair of brass floral lights by Paavo Tynell; a four-piece dining suite by Alvar Aalto; a Gio Ponti games table with its original green baize and ashtrays for each player; and a cabinet by Swedish designer Axel Einar Hjorth.

‘These pieces have a strong sense of balance, harmony and peace,’ says Uniacke. ‘Post-war Scandinavian designers represent this tremendous sense of possibility and hope, and we certainly need a little optimism and hope right now.’

PAD London, the historical and contemporary design fair, takes place 14-19 October 2025 in Berkeley Square. Rose Uniacke’s exhibition focuses on urban modernism, with furniture from Scandinavia, Italy and Austria

Explore the Collections sales at Christie’s in New York, London and Paris. Featuring a wide variety of European decorative arts, from the Baroque to the contemporary, they offer rare and exquisite objects of exceptional provenance. On view from 11 October in New York, 23 October in London and 31 October in Paris