Man About Town - Adam Bray
Now, we all love a good rockstar but the unspoken truth is that the coolest people by a country mile in the "music biz" are the managers. They're the ones with the whirring brains and the funky ideas who don't need the validation of fame or all the fluff that comes with it. They're the ones in charge - the powers behind the throne - and are intensely more interesting because of it.
Bray in his Maida Vale home // ALL PHOTOS BY TILLY PEARSON
And their equivalent in the loosely-generic "LIFE-STYLE" world is Adam Bray. He's the guy you don't see but his finger prints are over everything. What he does isn't a mystery...it's what he doesn't do that's difficult to answer. I guess his day job is decorating people's homes which he does with a rare combination of exquisitely good taste and beautifully researched scholarship. He's really out on his own here and in a world where pretty much everyone's homes look boringly identical, his just smother you with joy and make a convincing case for the existence of God!
Ok, so he's an interior decorator? Well, kinda. He started out as an antique dealer in Notting Hill. His shop in Ledbury Road in the early '90's was mesmerizing. It was a place of pilgrimage for all the great and the good...and perhaps the "not-so-good". It was one of THE great London shops. Everything was so beautiful that it became a fashion designers and stylists wet-dream. And the music...the music was sublime! From the turn-table at the back of the shop he fed through a constant stream of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield into the main room. This led to him styling shoots for magazines and very soon he was collaborating with pretty much everyone on designing everything from shirts and wallpapers to kitchens and carpets. You see where I'm coming from...finger prints everywhere.
His address book is a "who's who" of London and he belongs to the city in the same way that Warhol did to New York. As such, we thought who better to ask for his inline track on this great city of ours...
LB: Firstly, let's set the mood. What song do you want to soundtrack this interview?
AB: I'm going to go for Sabede by Cedric IM Brooks & The Light Of Saba.
LB: It's 4am and you can't sleep, where do you go?
AB: The flower market at New Covent Garden.
You've just received your paycheck and are feeling flash. You decide to take a friend out for dinner. Where do you go to splash the cash on the best food?
Maybe Japanese? ‘Dinings' in Marylebone is really, really delicious but so pretentious... everything is explained in painful detail... OR I'll buy a really amazing wine and stay in and feel smug.
You then wake up and realise you've blown all your money in one night. Where's the best cheap place to get breakfast?
I love the Regency Cafe in Westminster.
You've been awake for 24 hours and are feeling frazzled & vulnerable. All you want to do is "feed the soul", where do you go to find beauty?
This is a familiar feeling, I sneak into the National Gallery through the back door on Orange St and go straight down into the Reserve Collection, there’s pretty much no one there ever and lots of really amazing things to help you perk up.
Where do you go to feed the ducks?
The lake in Regents Park, it's where I fed the ducks with my Granny when I was little and where I fed the ducks with my kids when they were little.
PHOTOS BY TILLY PEARSON
The apocalypse is nigh. What's the last piece of art you want to stare at before everything vanishes?
Oooooh, that’s tricky one... maybe one of the incredible Byzantine icons in the Benaki Museum in Athens, to get a bit familiar with what I might be facing ?
You've decided to throw a last minute dinner party. Where are you getting your flowers to put on the table from? Or are flowers a no-go…?
Defintely flowers. If I can't nick them from the garden, the florist on the corner of Lancaster Road and Ladbroke Grove is good value...
You're a great chef but know nothing about pudding. Where in London are you going to stock up on sweet treats?
Depends on my budget , even a tiny slice of something amazing and beautiful is better than nothing…so something form Marchesi on Mount St cut into as many mouthfuls as necessary.
PHOTOS BY TILLY PEARSON
What cocktail do you start your dinner party off with?
Depends on the time of year and the crowd, I like one very punchy drink before dinner, not so much that we get into a fight or I burn the main course, either a bone dry gin martini with olives and a tiny splash of absinthe OR if its hot a ‘bicyclette’ ; two measure white wine one measure Campari, slice of orange and some soda water
What's the magic number for guests? How many is too many?
Hard to tell, I tend to do smaller and more often but have done as many as 16 but it was a lot of work and a lot of fun.
Who have you been listening to lately?
I've been listening to classical music quite a bit lately, particularly Alfred Brendel playing Haydn piano sonatas, all of human life is there.
What do you listen to on your Last Bus home?
Something reassuringly spacey like Astral Travel from Thembi by Pharoah Sanders.
Follow Adam on Instagram here, find his interiors here & his gold-dust playlists here.
