How One London Decorator Built a Business on Eccentricity

Jul 18, 2023

Emma Elwick-Bates

| Photography by Jo Metson Scott for WSJ. Magazine

Aug. 31, 2023 8:30 am ET

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Off a busy West London thoroughfare sits a former gentlemen’s club where Winston Churchill once stood under the Georgian portico, fingers flashing his V for victory. In an equally celebratory mood is its latest inhabitant, Swedish-born designer Beata Heuman, who is marking her 10th year in business by opening the 19th-century building’s forest-green doors as an appointment-only showroom and design studio—named 188 after its street number. Past the pillars and up the steps lined with flower-filled terracotta pots, her Dodo Egg Light with an ovoid glass shade anchors the porch. “The dodo is a good example of what my studio stands for, in light form,” says Heuman (pronounced HAY-men).

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