A Fine Mess

Julia Muggenburg doesn’t keep anything in drawers. In the downstairs library of the house on Thurloe Square in London that she shares with her husband and two children, a guest may find it hard to concentrate, surrounded as he is by a pleasant assault of objects and furnishings: deer antler sculptures by the Austrian artist Christian Eisenberger in the fireplace; walls of meticulously stacked art and design books; and hundreds of colorful glass objects, opalescent shells and fine pottery displayed on antique tables. This room is where Muggenburg, the jewelry designer behind Belmacz, receives guests, on sky blue leather Le Corbusier chairs, for tea served in tiny Japanese clay cups on an inlaid ivory and wood chess table from Syria. The parquet floors are hidden beneath lashings of bright Persian carpets, and ceiling space is shared between a translucent Flos fan and a clear Murano glass chandelier by Barovier & Toso. “It’s always been terribly important to be constantly surrounded by things that inspire me,” she says.

Muggenburg moved to London from Germany in 1991 to study sculpture and painting at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design. After college she met her husband, a businessman, and opened Belmacz as a gallery and showcase for her playful and ruminative collection of bracelets, earrings, pins and necklaces that fuse contemporary materials like oxidized silver with antique Roman and Indian coins — exactly the sort of unconventional juxtapositions you see here on Thurloe Square.

They bought the house in 2000 and right away Muggenburg set to work putting her mark on it. She loved the tall, narrow proportions of the Georgian architecture, but many of the additions and design details of previous owners had to go. “The house we bought was a faceless, cream-colored environment,” she says. “We ripped out all the superfluous details. We pulled up the fluffy Labrador carpet that covered the floors and discovered beautiful Portland stone.” From there, Muggenburg unleashed her art collection, layering the rooms with a lifetime of antiques and objects in a way that suggests chaos but, in fact, is her method of building tension and harmony.

“The rooms in my house are like 3-D sculptures,” Muggenburg says. “I am always moving around my furniture, pairing objects, or adding, subtracting or relocating things.” The kaleidoscope begins in the foyer, where an overwhelming collection of natural objects, from pangolin shells to whale vertebrae, share every inch of wall space with Georg Baselitz drawings and painted “bones” made of masking tape by her two sons. In the dining room, giant crystals stand in for logs in the fireplace, and a long glass table with Venetian Spatulato verdigris legs plays off the cool gray of the walls. And in the study, which is where her husband spends most of his time, a leather and ivory-inlaid mahogany Regency desk the size of a truck dominates the space. “The room sort of grew around this desk, and everything seems to work,” says Muggenburg, who beneath the desk placed a duct-tape mummy — another Eisenberger work — made by wrapping himself in tape and cutting his way out to leave a brown body-shaped cocoon.

Muggenburg says her taste was informed by her eclectic childhood. She was born in Mettmann, Germany, a town outside of Düsseldorf, and spent a lot of time in the countryside of Wuppertal, on a large piece of land that has been in her family since the 14th century. Her mother owned a small department store, and her father was a philosopher and gentleman of leisure who broke in horses and collected guns. Her mother had a great interest in all things Italian, and twice a year brought her on business trips to Venice, where they met and collaborated with the designer Roberta di Camerino and loaded up on Venetian fabrics and Murano glass. She learned how to sew from the seamstresses at her mother’s department store, and recalls being kept busy with needlework and pottery projects.

Their home had its share of sturdy German wood furniture; but here and there were modern pieces like Marcel Breuer chairs, Archille Castiglioni Taraxacum lights and KPM porcelain. While her youth was tempered by the beauty and malaise of the countryside, it was also fabulously cultured and vibrant. “I’ll never forget when my mother gave me the collected works of Goldoni,” says Muggenburg, referring to the 18th-century Italian playwright. “That, and of course all the jewelers she brought me to all over Italy.”

The sense of her house as a movable feast no doubt comes from Muggenburg’s travels. They show up everywhere: the Gaetano Pesce chairs in the garden came home with her from Turin. The conservatory has glass walls and ceilings covered in gauzy cotton fabric from India that lets in enough sunlight to bleach the books, the giant tortoise shells and the African tribal shields made of elephant and rhino hide. Even in the galley kitchen — a chockablock space that announces its constant use with shiny pots and skillets hanging in great clusters above a large island — every silver colander or shallow pot of honeycomb has some meaning for Muggenburg. “I have what they say in England is, ‘catholic taste,’ ” she says.”Which means my choices are extremely varied, and I don’t feel bad about that.”