Jermaine Gallacher is the kind of person who will be rifling through a pile of items marked ‘50p’ at a junk stall when he tells you about his run-in with a supermodel at some very private party the night before. A decorator, design dealer, writer and editor, he operates from a showroom off Borough High Street, where he files columns for Vogue (in praise of clutter, room dividers and ‘The Misunderstood Genius of an Accent Wall’), shows off his recent finds – a 1990s Nicolas Blandin Barbarian chair, a papier-mâché cat ornament – and coordinates his growing portfolio of interiors projects. His office features an old-fashioned desktop telephone; ‘I’m quite a landline person,’ he declares, proudly. With a fine set of cheekbones and a raucous, whinnying laugh, Gallacher puts me in mind of Lucian Freud gambling at Esmeralda’s Barn, or Alexander McQueen serving aristocrats his East End mum’s sandwiches: an ideal of high society and low living, graft and glamour, which London seems to specialize in.
Gallacher grew up in Brighton, where trips to a secondhand store his mother favoured and its offerings of ‘wavy vases, speckled paint effects’ began to shape his aesthetic. He moved to London to study illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, where a drawing tutor suggested he look at the work of the Memphis Group. With his interest in furniture piqued, Gallacher set up a stall in Spitalfields ‘selling crap: knick-knacks, candlesticks, metal things and bits of Ercol or G Plan’, he says. ‘I must have been ahead of my time, because nobody bought any of it!’
Tastes caught up: Gallacher took on a shop in Walker’s Court, Soho – ‘porn alley, before it was ruined’ – and various other sites. Since 2019, his showroom has doubled as Lant Street Wine, an offshoot of the vintner next door, open six days a week. Its stripped-wood panelling provides a tipsy but homely setting for Gallacher’s changing stock: think playfully mismatched chairs and zigzags of wrought iron.
In 2021, Gallacher’s openness to the wonky and riotous won him an unusual commission: an office in the historic Grays Inn Court for a barrister wanting to work among their dizzying personal collection of postmodern design; the result – a sci-fi villain’s lair in a slab of amethyst – appeared in 2022 in The World of Interiors. Projects continued: Bistro Freddie, a hip eatery in Shoreditch, and its recent offspring, Crispin, located within Clapham art hub Studio Voltaire; and a home for a young artist, in a listed Georgian Clerkenwell townhouse. This, Gallacher’s first domestic project, with its George Nakashima-inspired, micro-tiled bathroom and curvy steel kitchen counters, was documented in this April’s Architectural Digest, to the delight of Instagram.
Not that Gallacher necessarily enjoys this kind of attention. ‘I can see when it happens,’ he says. ‘There is a kind of crazy moment, and it actually gets a bit embarrassing. It’s that thing where you don’t want something to be a commodity. I think of the arts and crafts movement and the ideal of something being really handmade and specific. I sometimes tell makers who are starting to churn out one thing: “Stop making that now!” Or it becomes’ – he almost spits out the word – ‘pedestrian’.
This deep aversion to middle-of-the-road, ‘acceptable’ taste drove the creation of TON, an interiors magazine Gallacher founded with Rory Gleeson and Ted Stansfield last year. Launched to a packed crowd at Soho’s Tenderbooks, the latest issue features artist George Rouy’s converted chapel on the cover. Its subjects quite intentionally range from the sumptuous to the shoestring – anything as long as it is pursued with authenticity and verve. Many pages are dedicated to showing not spaces but makers, including Barnaby Lewis and Andu Macebo.
Before work begins on TON issue four, Gallacher has a few bits to attend to: launching a collaborative collection with the cult textile designer Christine Van Der Hurd and, in November, mounting an exhibition of work by glass artist Miranda Keyes at the Ragged School in Borough’s Union Street. Before that, during Frieze Week, is the opening of the revamped Below Stone Nest, a late-night bar in the West End founded by Frank and Jackson Boxer (of Frank’s Cafe and Brunswick House fame) in the basement of a Victorian former Welsh chapel. The site was once home to Limelight, a club where Simon Le Bon, George Michael and Marc Almond – one of Gallacher’s idols – used to live it up. Alongside chairs and sconces by the artist Ben Burgis, Gallacher is paying tribute to this history by painting a new mural, inspired by Jean Cocteau. Any concerns about picking up the brush again? He laughs. ‘Only that people will try to make off with the candlesticks’.
This article first appeared in Frieze Week, London 2024 under the title ‘A Bit of a Sort’.
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Main image: Jermaine Gallacher in his showroom, London, 2024. Portrait: George Eyres
