A rented flat in Chelsea transformed through art and antiques by Sally Wilkinson

‘We came with three suitcases each and they were just filled with clothes.’ For an interior designer, Sally Wilkinson travelled rather lightly when she relocated across continents. ‘We came thinking it would be pretty temporary. I also wanted the freedom to find stuff over here,’ says Sally. ‘In retrospect, I’m happy I didn’t bring a lot over – it would all be out of here by now.’

Sally is speaking to me on video call from the dining room table of her one-bed Chelsea flat. The designer moved here from Atlanta, Georgia with her husband Taylor, in 2020, after the pandemic left them with wanderlust. Texas-born, Sally lived in five different states before turning 13, but ironically the move across the pond was more straightforward than staying stateside. ‘We couldn’t decide on a city in the US. So we thought “why don’t we move to London?”’ For a year Sally worked as a senior designer at Salvesen Graham before setting up her own practice in 2022 – a company she runs from the dining room table.

Having searched across the city, they settled on this flat on a lively street filled with restaurants and galleries in a ‘younger, livelier’ area of Chelsea. The property – which they rent – appealed to Sally for its ‘bones’: white walls, big windows, high ceilings and good quality finishes. ‘It was a blank canvas for me to work with,’ she explains.

Sally approached her own home differently to those of her clients. ‘I gave myself the freedom not to design the place,' she says. 'I was working on this in conjunction with starting a business, so I didn’t want to take it so seriously – and to buy things I liked and see how it mixed together.’ Sally would stay up late scrolling auction sites for furniture, and has taken advantage of the abundance of antiques fairs and flea markets peppered across Europe. ‘The antique world over here is really fun and refreshing,’ says Sally. Key among her trouvailles has been an 11-piece botanical artwork found in the South of France, distributed between friends’ suitcases in order to get them back to London.

‘Art,’ says Sally, ‘adds the soul to a space.’ It is fitting then that one piece of artwork made it all the way from her native Texas: an abstract painting hung high in the entrance hall. ‘One day it clicked and I thought “that painting has to be in London with me."' The work's palette of yellows, greens and browns ‘carries through the flat,’ and is picked up in the olive sofa as well as various upholstery choices and soft furnishings. In the living room, a yellow drypoint of a camel they bought from local gallery Cricket Fine Art rhymes with the Texan painting, a decorative announcement of their arrival in London.

Whilst the flat looks like it could belong to an eclectic older gentleman who has accrued a lifetime of treasures, Sally admits it is more transitional as a home (as you might expect from young professionals who are renting). As a quick decoration fix Sally added curtains to the bathroom sink and slipcovers to the existing dining chairs. The galley kitchen, is, quips Sally, ‘my excuse not to cook… it’s more of a butler’s pantry’ The art and light-filled space contains an olive tree, however, that is ‘very happy in there,' she says. 'It has doubled in size.’ Sally and her husband, who travel back to the United States for weeks at a time for work, are similarly content when they return home. Small and low maintenance, the flat ‘is a good place to land and just rest.’