A designer and antique dealer’s characterful Maida Vale flat, in which every object tells a story

Adam Bray’s knack for mixing colour, antiques and textiles has earned him a cult following and nowhere is it more in evidence than his own London home +++dropcap The antiques dealer and interior designer Adam Bray describes himself as ‘very much a creature of central London’. We’re in his apartment in Maida Vale, a few streets away from Abbey Road, which he has rented for the best part of a decade from an old client who became a good friend. Occupying most of the ground floor of a stucco-fronted villa built around 1840, this is the furthest north he has ever lived, though it is only about a mile from where he was brought up. His dad had a flat on Chiltern Street in Marylebone (‘before it was smart’) and he was a product of what they call the long Sixties (that period that in fact encompasses the early to mid-Seventies) when the city still had a feeling of post-war decay and hippiedom.