Dealers, decorators, designers, dandies – is there anything Benedict Foley and Daniel Slowik don’t do beautifully? Benedict – rarely seen sans silk cravat and navy painter’s smock – is something of a style savant. A whizz at framing (read his tips here), he’s also a fabulously fun colourist who knows the value of a good leopard print and, when it comes to blinds, what qualifies the right amount of ruffle. Daniel, meanwhile, is cut from different – though no less delightful – cloth. Ex-Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, he speaks the language of the country-house look fluently: historically informed, context-led, rich yet understated.
Such style has, of course, been brought to bear at home too, which the couple share with “a large number of ceramics”. They split their time between Hackney, in a late Regency flat constructed in the 1830s as part of the De Beauvoir town development, and a cottage in East Anglia’s Dedham Vale, built in 1804 as one of a pair of mill workers’ lodgings, “so it’s relatively modern for an area known for its Tudor timber architecture,” Benedict explains. It’s here that, when not tirelessly working on new schemes for clients, stocking up their covetable cache of antiques or, in Benedict’s case, designing his next frame or wall bracket, the couple can normally be found rehanging their near-endless collection of pictures, as he explains below. We’d never have guessed.
