London’s Cheyne Walk presents a sedate streetscape that bears no witness, save some blue English Heritage plaques embedded in various façades, to its daredevil history. To the redbrick Georgian and Queen Anne houses and apartment buildings that line this Thames-side street in Chelsea, all manner of creative iconoclasts since the third quarter of the 19th century have gravitated. Querulous painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler bunked here, as did dandified tastemaker Christopher Gibbs, actor Laurence Olivier, and a few of the Rolling Stones, plus Marianne Faithfull.
“All of Chelsea is a fairy tale for me,” says Patrick Mele, a young decorator who is based in New York City but looks straight out of the Cheyne Walk playbook, with a tousled mop of dark hair foaming above an angular face that’s pure Egon Schiele. “My best friend growing up was English, so I have always been drawn to that Anglo sensibility. And I used to come here a decade ago, when I worked for Ralph Lauren, to work on the stores.” So, when Sara Tayeb-Khalifa and her husband, Hussein Khalifa, high-fived Mele’s zesty decoration of a bedroom in their Manhattan apartment, they offered to send him back across the pond to revamp the Cheyne Walk flat they had owned since the early 1990s.
“I had done it room by room by room, but nothing matched—plus, I no longer wanted safe,” explains the elegant Tayeb-Khalifa, a former Phillips executive who is partnering with sustainable-fashion designer Jussara Lee on collections of T-shirts and cushions. “I wanted to make it happy: happy colors, happy home.” To that end, her discussions with Mele were peppered with references to Auntie Mame, Miss Havisham, and the ceilings of old French bistros, stained “a color that reminds you of cigarettes, wine, bad alcohol, and more cigarettes,” Tayeb-Khalifa says with a laugh. —Mitchell Owens
