David Hockney spent most of his working life in a vast room in a flat in a rather run-down area of Notting Hill. The room suited him simply because it was big enough for him to work and think in.
In the last few years, things changed. Whilst he was in the United States supervising the hanging of an exhibition of his paintings, he wrote and asked Mo McDermott, a young decorator working in London, to move in with painters and joiners and make the place more of a home upon his return.
Mr McDermott took the artist at his word and acted boldly, stripping the wooden floor, painting the walls and ceiling white with a touch of pale blue; introducing bookshelves and some esoteric items, including two tables bought in a sale of unwanted furniture from the Strand Palace Hotel and a Tiffany lamp which the artist brought back from the States. He also introduced the most esoteric touch likely to have been found in any London house this year past: several wooden cut-out trees designed and made by himself.
"I've been working on this idea for cut-out trees for a year now," says Mr McDermott. "In fact, they take up most of my time these days. David saw some of my early prototypes and asked me to make "a forest" for his own flat. I concentrated the resulting "specimen" trees, so to speak, in the large white room, keeping simple and uncluttered. So far all the trees have been cut and painted by hand but I'm working with Jeremy Fry on an idea, for producing them as multiples.
The result, trees and all, is a large, five-windowed room, bare, cool and spacious, ideal for an artist little concerned with the need for antique furniture or any of the more conventional self-awarded trappings of success. The large bedroom continues this note with palest cream walls and woodwork, a vast mirrored built-in wardrobe, another Strand Palace table and one more McDermott tree.
