Enjoying caviar demands a suitably luxurious serving dish. The award-winning designer Katharine Pooley describes her conch shell caviar bowl as “the most incredible, to-die-for piece”.
It has a to-die-for price, too – Dh98,000.
Inside the conch shell, nestles a clear crystal bowl for the caviar.
“It is absolutely colossal,” Ms Pooley says of the unusually huge shell. “It’s just so, so hard to find a bowl so big – it’s just delicious.”
While she launched her own homeware line six months ago, she also procures bowls and a Thai supplier that offers these in two designs – one has an amethyst-eyed, solid silver dragon climbing over it; the other is decorated by a starfish and is adorned by amethysts.
Ms Pooley stumbled across the Thai supplier on her travels. The silver is from India, the jewels from Myanmar.
Because very large shells are so difficult to find, the pieces are high. “You can reorder,” she says. “But you are looking at a six-month lead time. And if you ask for 100 — absolutely no. Sorry.”
Ms Pooley, who services her UAE clients via her online shop, has eponymous boutiques in London and Doha.
She lived in Asia for 16 years where she worked in banking. Her move into interior design as a full-time career was unexpected.
She and her husband bought “four houses across four continents and I did them up” she says. “People seemed to love what I had done.
“We went back to London and someone said, ‘Will you do my house’ and I said ‘Yes’ and then Mohamed Al-Fayed [then the owner of Harrods] asked me to do a house and before I knew it I had a huge team in London and a lovely boutique and I didn’t look back.”
As well as her interior design services, Ms Pooley’s homeware range offers highly individual pieces for bathrooms, dining, drinks and the study. She also stocks antique and luxury items.
The extent of her travels are evident in the collection. Particularly beautiful are the silver-plated Arabian picture frames starting at Dh1,586.
For cigar smokers, her elegant handcrafted, shagreen humidors featuring a sterling silver dragon, a cedar lining, a humidification device and a hygrometer, which measures the moisture content in the atmosphere, are “small enough to go with you when you travel, but elegant enough to keep on a desk”. They retail at Dh108,425.
From banker to luxury designer
Katharine Pooley is the founder of the eponymous luxury architecture, furniture and interior design company
You have your boutique in Knightsbridge, London, but also a store in Doha. How did that come about?
We did up the VIP suites at London Terminal 5. And Nasser Al Ansari, the chief executive of Qatar real estate company Octagon, happened to go through and he loved what we had done. He asked if we could come and do his house. We did that in seven months and then he said, “Let’s do a shop”.
Have you any plans to open in the UAE?
I’d love to be in Abu Dhabi and I’d love to be in Dubai. I actually grew up in Bahrain so I know the Middle East very well. I’m just trying to find the right partner and location. There is so much demand for people to open down there. I think Qatar is expanding very fast. There are a lot of opportunities. I really loved it.
How did you find the transition from banking to interior design?
It just happened. You are either creative or you are not; I was blessed to say that I am. You’ve also got to have good taste, love colours. I’ve travelled a lot, enormously, and that helps to understand the cultures. We have a very big team – 35 to 40 people – we love to travel, we understand the client, customer service. The banking side of it is super important because it helps you put a structure in place, administration, finances. You’ve got to understand your figures and how you can turn things round with a good profit margin.
lgutcher@thenational.ae
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