‘I truly believe color and pattern enhance your life, they make it more interesting' – lessons in maximalism from Stephanie Barba Mendoza

With details that pique the curiosity at every turn, the house design scheme in this Antwerp home is like a jewel box of surprises. From the tassel fringe on a lampshade to the braid contouring a hand-painted wallpaper; the piping on a sofa to the contrasting lining of a curtain, there is always something to excite the eye.

‘It is the small details that make all the difference,’ notes Stephanie Barba Mendoza, the creative behind these confident yet surprisingly calm interiors. ‘They turn a room from good to great,’ she adds.

Stephanie, who was born and raised in Mexico, cut her teeth with one of the most noteworthy maximalists of our time, Martin Brudnizki, who has studios in both New York and London. She spent 10 formative years at the London practice, and it was her work as lead designer on the exuberant interiors of Mayfair’s private members’ club, Annabel’s, that caught the eye of these homeowners.

‘I had just set up my own studio at the start of 2020 when they contacted me, originally for help with the drawing room,’ she recollects. The couple – he is Belgian, she is Dutch – had built the Tudor-style home on the outskirts of Antwerp six years previously.

‘She is a passionate Anglophile and every detail had been done beautifully using very carefully chosen materials,’ recounts Stephanie. ‘She is also a big collector of antiques and chinoiserie and she loves to be brave with color and pattern. We were a match made in heaven.’

The conundrum the owners faced was how to furnish the large drawing room so that it could feel warm and intimate when just the pair of them were at home (their two teenage children are at boarding school and university).

‘My client loves the English country house style of the American interior designer Mario Buatta, so that was our starting point, together with some gilded chinoiserie mirrors she already owned,’ says Stephanie, whose experience designing for the hospitality industry proved invaluable: ‘I have often designed large rooms to accommodate smaller groups of people, and that’s exactly what we needed here.’

A pair of back-to-back sofas have a zoning effect, effectively dividing the room in half. Within these two spaces, Stephanie has created further intimate pockets, such as an area for playing cards and a reading space next to the fireplace. The star of the show is a hand-painted wallpaper from de Gournay, which is complemented by the owner’s collections of art and antiques as well as fabrics and passementerie that bring a sense of warmth and comfort.

‘I didn’t use any printed fabrics as I felt this room needed something richer: silk velvets for the sofas and more robust tapestry weaves for pieces such as the ottomans, as they double as footstools,’ says Stephanie, who offset these colorful choices with a neutral-toned, leopard-patterned carpet. ‘Like me, the client loves an animal print,’ she approves.

Thrilled with the drawing room, the owners asked Stephanie to turn her attention to other spaces in the house including the family room, the dining space off the kitchen, and the large main suite. For the latter, the brief was a chintz-filled room: ‘I came up with five different options and in the end, the client chose a leafy Jean Monro chintz as it was such a departure from the scheme she had before; I also think that a botanical pattern is good for creating a sense of calm,’ Stephanie says.

The same fabric was used for the walls – where it was backed with paper – bed drapes, armchairs, and blinds, whose sumptuous festoon style adds softness to the windows. The carpet, which features a moiré pattern that complements the headboard fabric, is an archive design by another decorating great, Madeleine Castaing.

‘We tracked down the company in France that still produces Madeleine Castaing carpets and we had five different samples made to get the exact color we wanted,’ says Stephanie, admitting that such exacting levels of detail require a certain degree of patience. ‘We were decorating the house during the depths of the pandemic so everything took time.’

For Stephanie – and, indeed, her clients – that patience has paid off. ‘There is a personality coming through these rooms that reflects the passions and interests of the owners; you really get a sense of who they are,’ she says. ‘I truly believe color and pattern enhance your life – they make it more interesting'.