Cécile Bell

Cecile helped me design a kids bedroom and refresh our master bedroom. She was great at working out our tastes but also pushing us to try new colour combinations, materials and designs. Her professional contacts (upholsterer, curtain maker and metal worker) all turned out to be high quality, reliable and good value. And on a personal level she was fun to work with, responsive, generous with her time and flexible – important as the project spanned my second baby’s arrival and lockdown! We’re so pleased with the results and wouldn’t hesitate to work with her again and recommend her to friends.

Last year we decided to do a side return and extension of our kitchen, plus a remodelling of the downstairs to create a utility room and WC, putting in a new bathroom upstairs, and redecorating the hallway. We were feeling rather overwhelmed by all the decisions required when a friend recommended we meet Cecile. What a brilliant introduction that was! Cecile made a stressful project so much easier to navigate. She listened carefully to our hopes and worries about the space. She created a series of mood boards which we loved and gave us a shared sense of the look we wanted. It was fantastic having Cecile recommend colours schemes, wallpapers and materials which meant choosing from 4 or 5 options rather than thousands. She gave us confidence to be a bit bolder than we might have been, and the colours flow beautifully through the house. She had great ideas about clever storage solutions; shortlisted brilliant lighting, furniture, tiles, sanitary wear and accessories from suppliers we didn’t know - all at affordable prices; and even got us some big trade discounts which helped offset her fee. She was always calm, very flexible and happy to advise throughout the project (which was a very testing time during a pandemic!). We are so delighted with how it all looks. It feels like our home, full of things and colours that we love and have chosen, but Cecile helped to facilitate the journey with her French style and gentle good humour, making it feel like we had a friend with excellent taste and good contacts, helping us to make decisions quickly and easily. We really can’t thank her enough!

Cecile has designed and improved several areas of our house over two different projects. Her skills encompass total solution design for small spaces, utility, wetroom and bathroom, wall panel design, design and manufacture of bespoke cement tiles, sourcing of vintage and new pieces and of course, layout, lighting, colour and fabric. She has kept function, durability and sustainability as well as the aesthetic at the core of the work. As a result of being able to marry all these together with the design brief and our personal style preference, she has created rooms and spaces that are easy, functional, comfortable to be in that look good and that we love living in. In addition, she has a professional yet relaxed manner that her makes her very easy to work with. We cannot recommend her highly enough and will call upon her again for any future projects.

I’m a big fan of Cécile’s work. We first worked with her 8 years ago, when we needed a design for our bedroom and family bathroom. It was a great pleasure to work with her, so much so than when we moved into a new house a year ago there wasn’t any doubt that we would turn to her again. She is a great listener and was able to incorporate our ideas and vision while bringing in her own creativity and some great solutions in a seamingless way. She is very good at tying it all in and is particularly good at colours. An then she has the magic touch, a certain “je ne sais quoi”. I wanted our interiors to look grown up, while cosy and not too precious, and reflect our personalities. She managed to deliver all of that on the button, each time.I highly recommend to anybody who wants elegant and timeless interiors, not a copy and paste from Instagram/ Pinterest, with little touches of magic here and there.