Interior design used to be a solitary activity, where homeowners in search of inspiration leafed through the pages of Elle Decoration, or scrolled endlessly through Houzz and Pinterest. But with the recent rise in experience-based travel, aesthetically minded homeowners are ditching conventional holidays — sunbathing and piña coladas — and embarking on design-led pilgrimages, where creativity and colour-mixing comes with comfortable en suites.
Driven by their love of interiors, with their hands held by expert designers and artists, they roam flea markets in Turin, learn colour confidence and Islamic design in the souks of Marrakesh, master decorative printmaking techniques in the heat of the subcontinent, or explore the nuances of contemporary art in the hip galleries of the Big Apple.
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Go baroque in Italy
Kate Watson-Smyth runs design retreats that include tours of her Italian villa and trips into Turin, aboveSergio Formoso/Getty Images
With 22 Unesco-protected palazzos built by the royal Savoy dynasty in the 16th century, the northwest region of Piedmont is littered with baroque inspiration. The interior designer and author Kate Watson-Smyth runs a three-day design retreat here, inviting guests into her 24-room villa for inspiration for £4,200 per person, all inclusive. “I probably shouldn’t say this,” says Watson-Smyth, “But the palazzos in Turin make Versailles look a bit like a council house. The gold and the decoration are extraordinary.”
Bought during lockdown, Watson-Smyth’s villa is in a cosy rural village near Turin. But guests actually stay in the NH Torino Lingotto Congress hotel, a former Fiat factory and 1920s modernist gem designed by the architect Giacomo Mattè-Trucco. Its roof still has the racetrack used in the 1969 film The Italian Job, as well as the Pinacoteca Agnelli, a gallery housing the personal collection of the Agnelli family (founders of Fiat) filled with works by Matisse, Canaletto and Picasso.
Watson-Smyth, centre in black top, leading one of her retreatsKate Watson Smyth
The retreats — the next one is May 8-12 — are “about gaining a deeper understanding of personal style and how to achieve it”, Watson-Smyth says. Days are spent exploring the inner workings of her villa (which she is still renovating — six of the 24 rooms are finished), workshopping individual ideas, quaffing coffee in Turin’s oldest café, Al Bicerin, and delving into Il Gran Balon, an enormous vintage market. “We want them to go home with a starting point, whether it’s a silk scarf or some Murano lights. It’s subconsciously immersive,” she says. “There is a lot of teaching to adapt things to your own homes. You don’t want to create a pastiche of an Italian palazzo; you can’t put that in a modern house on a cul-de-sac in the UK. But that’s not to say they can’t pick some richer colours or adapt elements. It’s not going to be Versailles, but they’re taking something from it.”
Meet artisans in Marrakesh
Sophie Robinson’s interior retreats include visits to local rug marketsJudd Brotman/Getty Images
“It’s important to snap out of your creative coma.” So says Sophie Robinson, an interior designer and television host nicknamed the queen of colour. For the past three years she has been running interior retreats in Marrakesh (from £3,523) with El Fenn, a colour-drenched hotel co-founded by Marrakesh Biennale’s Vanessa Branson, Richard’s sister. “It’s good to get out of your lane, to feel alive and have your senses and synapses lit up.”
Under turquoise skies, Robinson reveals the city’s artisanal heartbeat: hand-tufted rug makers, zellige tile producers such as Popham, leather workers, copper beaters and wood carvers, and more than 100-year-old ceramic producers including Serghini. There are also private tours of “real” homes, including the riad owned by the 1960s actress and model Marisa Berenson.
The colour-drenched interiors at the El Fenn hotel in Marrakesh Cecil Treal
Interior designers often attend alongside home-curious guests; Robinson instructs them all to bring measurements, fabric and paint swatches to keep design plans on track. While interiors shopping abroad, “Some things travel better than others,” Robinson cautions. “Rugs look great in British homes, and pottery — I use safi cups as flower vases, or in the bathroom — but I wouldn’t buy an entire dinner service, and any lighting needs to be entirely rewired.”
Get arty in the Big Apple
Willow Kemp takes her guests on personalised art walks through ManhattanQuentin Bacon
Willow Kemp describes the city of New York as “one of the most compelling design objects imaginable”. The daughter of Kit Kemp, the boutique hotel queen, Willow is an interior designer, art ambassador to Firmdale Hotels, architect and sculptor. She is taking guests on personalised art walks through SoHo, Midtown and Tribeca, taking in the works she has curated inside the Crosby Street, the Whitby or the Warren Street hotels.
“New York offers an intensity, scale and momentum that feels very different from Europe. There’s a sense that art is happening now, at full volume,” she says.
The tours include a stop at the Whitby, where Kemp has curated numerous artworks Quentin Bacon
Tours — the first one is May 9, at £95 a person — will begin at breakfast, looking at artworks in the hotel, detailing an artist, the framing and arrangement. “We talk about placement, how to hang it in a period home or a contemporary space — I want people to experience how art has the power to create an atmosphere,” she says.
The group go on to the Morgan Library & Museum, the New Museum or Timothy Taylor Gallery. “When you explore galleries there, you feel the city’s restless energy reflected in the work — urgent, experimental and alive.”
Discover colour in India
The City Palace overlooking Lake Pichola in Udaipur, RajasthanVladimir Sklyarov/Getty Images
In Rajasthan, northwestern India, the artist and colour expert Annie Sloan encourages guests on her furniture-painting retreat to bring a suitcase big enough to accommodate, among other things, a “small cabinet”. Each locally made cabinet forms the foundation of the six-day workshop, which Sloan hosts at the Bujera Fort in Udaipur, alongside rug paint-stencilling, block-print making and papier-mâché decorating. “I want visitors to discover colour and understand heritage, via the whole background of India and how it influences interiors,” she says.
Alongside evening cocktails and morning yoga, Sloan takes visitors on a tour of the 450-year-old City Palace Museum and into the studio of the local artist Rajesh Soni. For February’s retreat, guests flew in from New Zealand, Australia, Cape Town, Romania, the Cayman Islands, the US and the UK to learn from her and the designer Tristan Merriam.
Annie Sloan, second from right, with her guests in RajasthanAnnie Sloan
“It’s about [guests] getting in the zone and being allowed to forget time, politics and the horrible boringness of reality, to discover their own creativity,” Sloan says. “People connect with themselves while having the time to paint and look at things. We teach them simple ideas, they’re not artists, and some are scared stiff. But I love it when they say, ‘I didn’t realise I was creative.’”
Sloan says each piece made will work at home back under the grey skies of Blighty. “The colours we use, like paprika red or Frida blue, you find in rugs, fabrics and paintings; they sit well in all interiors, nothing would look weird. And people tend to stick to the same tones. They really do carry their own palettes in their heads.”