- - I'm Kit Kemp, design director for Firmdale Hotels. Every room is like a painted canvas. It has to tell a story. This is the drawing room at the Ham Yard Hotel. We've travelled through the restaurant and as you turn the corner there's a beautiful Brazilian artwork which I love, it looks like the artist has been on Copacabana Beach and done a whole circle of women wearing their bikinis and different costumes. And it shows my love of folk art. There always has to be some kind of inspiration. It's not just folk art from one country but from all over the world, and I think very often you feel that you can't mix Swedish, with Indian, with English, with pottery, with wood, with metals, but actually if you're very brave, you can. In every room you actually need something to centre it. And I love the old French stone fireplaces. We have beautiful pottery by Robina Jacks. Her work is like alchemy. Before it's actually put into the kiln who knows what the colours are going to be like and I have no idea how she arrives at these beautiful combinations, but to me they're a work of art. We have to bring in the fabrics as well, and the small sofa is inspired by asafo which is a Ghanaian fabric. The other sofas are in a fabric which to me look like a Kandinsky painting. They're soft gentle colours but the patterns and abstract design are just very Kandinsky. There are so many colours in it that in fact I can put any other colour in the room. On the back wall though I just wanted to have something which was textural and quite strong. The artist there is called Phillipa Sternguard. Beside it is a beautiful Swedish piece, 1815 and it's a marriage cabinet. It's a wonderful sort of orange glowing colour. And on the inside just faded pictures of flowers. It's a decorative piece but can be used as a desk. To be an interior designer you have to be a magician. It's a way of deceiving the eye. Some things that look very expensive aren't. And for example in this room there's a very large mirror over a draper's table. The scale of the draper's table is long but it's really a piece of junk. But the way that you combine it together with the wonderful old mirror above it suddenly makes it look very special. This is a newly finished room so I'm as curious about it as anybody else. But it already has a feel of somewhere that has evolved, that hasn't just come in over night and I think that's one of the secrets of interior design. Not to make it look so fresh and new that you're scared to take one step in the room let alone mess up a cushion. What I love is to actually mix all these things together and make them into something special. It's really about function and form and scale and that's something that you learn over time.