The British jeweler Joe Spiro, 33, spends his days surrounded by a glittering rainbow of gems, designing one-off, maximalist pieces for Glenn Spiro, the 11-year-old private jewelry house he runs with his father. After work, however, the native Londoner leaves all that sparkle and color behind, retreating to a first-floor apartment in an early-20th-century building in Bayswater, where the palette is warm and calming and the décor is deliberately pared down. “Coming home resets me,” Spiro says of the 1,250-square-foot flat. “Nothing competes; the space breathes.”
Spiro first visited the apartment in 2023 and was immediately seduced by its views onto Hempel Gardens, the leafy private park across the street. “It was summer, and the light was extraordinary,” he says. “Every surface was beaming.” The interiors, however, were less appealing: the layout consisted of a warren of small rooms, and the finishes felt too classic for his taste. Happily, he knew the right person to transform the space: the Venezuelan-born, Paris-based designer Valerie Name Bolaño, 34, whom he’d befriended while on holiday in Athens in 2022, at which point she was based there. “He wanted something a little feminine,” says Name Bolaño. “It created this interesting dialogue between the work I do, which can be raw and masculine, and who he is: a big guy but also a sensitive person.”
Name Bolaño began by expanding the entry hall and combining two bedrooms to create a larger primary suite with an attached dressing room. She also repositioned several doors, raising their frames and aligning them with the windows, maximizing the natural light and verdant vistas in the process. In the spacious living room, she added a plasterwork fireplace surround and moldings, both with stepped geometric profiles; painted the walls and ceiling a honeyed stone hue; and installed wide-plank oak flooring. Once the canvas was “clean and soothing,” says Name Bolaño “I thought, let’s really go into the details.”
Several of those details are the result of creative collaborations between the friends. For Spiro’s dressing room, for example, Name Bolaño commissioned forged-bronze doorknobs based on a pair of gem-encrusted, clover-shaped earrings from Spiro’s line, and the two worked together on the design of the built-in, elliptical mahogany kitchen table. Name Bolaño also put the focus on Spiro’s collection of art and objets, including works by the German-British painter Frank Auerbach, the Catalan painter and sculptor Antoni Tàpies and the young London-based artists Alvaro Barrington and Alexander James. Spiro is particularly fond of a trio of bronze duck figurines that he found many years ago at an antiques store on Golborne Road and that now perch on the living room mantle. “The home grew from Joe’s objects outward, shaping a residence that feels intimate, timeless and unmistakably his,” says Name Bolaño, who added her own stamp with semi-opaque handblown glass vases, platters and lamps that she produced with artisans in New York.
Once a three-bedroom, the apartment now contains a wood-paneled study-cum-media room with a foldout guest bed in addition to Spiro’s primary suite. There, Name Bolaño used soft hues that range from cream to beige to nearly blush to create a cozy, cocoonlike environment, which she outfitted with a custom wool rug and a woven wool bed frame, silk wallpaper from Dedar and custom silk and cotton pillows with bronze buttons.
The kitchen, where Spiro’s labradoodle, Winnie, has her bed, strikes a different note. “He wanted a quirky English tone, so the kitchen needed color,” says Name Bolaño. “And I wanted it to be unexpected and joyful.” To that end, she brought together stainless-steel countertops with oxblood-red lacquered cabinets and a deep-green Guatemalan marble floor. Under the bay window, a banquette is upholstered in a flowery, 1930s-inspired Schumacher print. “I wasn’t sure about florals because I only had my grandma’s home in mind, but Valerie insisted,” says Spiro, who, in the end, was delighted by the choice. “She sees people,” he says of Name Bolaño. “Working with her, I feel understood.”