Tara Bernerd interview: Designer to the super-rich on modern luxe

Tara Bernerd is the go-to designer for the super-rich looking to overhaul their penthouse, floating gin palace or hotel complex. Krissi Murison gets a lesson in modern luxe.

Old and new, there are two types of luxury, according to Tara Bernerd, interior architect and designer to the obscenely rich. "Old-school luxury, which looks like Baccarat cut glass. It looks like a woman with beautiful diamond earrings in a Dior dress, sitting in Claridge's," she purrs. "And new-age luxury, which looks like a woman sitting in a marvellous loft development with the latest Phillips de Pury catalogue, chunky Stephen Webster jewellery and her Baccarat by Philippe Starck glassware."

Bernerd, 47 — she looks like Sheryl Crow and sounds like a sexy octogenarian brigadier — is who you call if you want a splash of the latter in your new superyacht, say, or chalet in Gstaad. Best known for her work with high-end hotels (she's doing the Four Seasons in Fort Lauderdale and the new Equinox in downtown Los Angeles), she is the go-to for the sort of international industrial luxe that manages to feel both edgy and reassuringly expensive.

"I'm probably known as more handsome than pretty, more urban than twee," she says when we meet at the Hari in Belgravia — a hotel whose innards were gutted, reshaped and reupholstered by her team. It is pure TB: lashings of modernist stone, Crittall window frames, exposed brick and statement art, but also lots of cosy corners with low lighting and old books.

This final detail is important. In today's globalised world, where people travel more than ever for business, Bernerd says the days of hotels as the grand "mausoleum you went 'wow' to" are gone, replaced by a desire for "homes from home that make you feel a warmth and an association". If anyone knows about nomadic living, it's her. She has just jetted in from America when we meet. Before that she was in Milan and before that Munich. Tomorrow she'll go to Switzerland. "I don't know if one can beat jet lag, you learn to accommodate it," she says fabulously.

Heads turn as the woman once dubbed the Pussy Galore of the London design scene by GQ magazine swaggers around the hotel she created — all power hair and booming Patsy Stone voice. Inspiration, she says, comes in many forms: "Books, magazines, collections in a gallery, lighting in a film or just … attitudes. Attitudes inspire me!" She tells me she once based the entire design of a hotel project in Chicago around a cigarette holder she'd found. "It was something in the ivory colouring hitting the bronze, hitting the ebony," she says, drifting off into a reverie about 1930s movie stars and black velvet furnishings.

As the well-heeled daughter of the property developer Elliott Bernerd (entry 978=, worth £120m in this year's Rich List), Tara could very easily have become just another insufferable, charity-gala-gracing socialite. But quitting school at 16 seems to have been the making of her.

"As soon as I left, there were no cuddly warm arms from my mother or father. It was: 'Get out and get a job, young lady. If you don't go to school, you work.'" So she did — as a nursery-school teacher, in PR and marketing and, finally, in property, where "I learnt huge amounts — contracts, negotiations, handling yourself in a boardroom and the acquiring of sites".

It left her with business acumen to rival her creative vision. Today, the practice she founded in 2002 is overseeing projects in Hong Kong and Japan, North America and Europe. Before the big hotel commissions, she earned her stripes doing residences for the impossibly suave and well connected. Previous designs include the Balearic lair of a mysterious author in Mallorca and the New York bachelor pad of someone she has referred to as her "James Bond of clients".

Her own home is an open-plan apartment overlooking the river in Battersea, southwest London, populated with exquisite objets — which, according to Bernerd, are the true markers of luxury. "Great art, intelligent furniture buying … it doesn't mean everything's mid-century, but it can't just be generic. To show personality, to show knowledge of art, knowledge of furniture, in itself shows interest and travel — and those things come out of time, which is our greatest luxury."

Next up, she wants to explore "the world of product and furniture", she says, pointing out pieces around the hotel — including the concierge desk and a velvet sofa in the lobby — that her company has designed. Later down the line, "we might look at participating in hotel ownership" too.

She got married last year to husband No 3, the financier Tommy Foxcroft (she split from James Archer, son of Jeffrey, in 2009; her first husband was the property developer John Hitchcox). Thanks to Foxcroft, she is now stepmother to a 3½-year-old son. Sharing space with a preschooler has given her a whole new perspective on interiors. "Storage would now become a massive part of my design," she laughs, thinking back to previous family projects she has worked on.

When it comes to what the super-rich want in their homes today, "there's a lot of emphasis on dressing areas. The walk-in dressing room has as much relevance as the bathroom in scale — dressing tables are huge, walkaround island units. It's almost to the level of retail." She's done "iceberg" basements too — "they do allow for amazing media rooms or party rooms with a hangout bar area. And, of course, fitness is massive in homes and in hotels. Health is our new wealth, it's everything."

It's not all building playgrounds for the global 1%, though. In 2007, Bernerd was commissioned to give the middle-class holiday crèche Center Parcs a nationwide overhaul of its cabins and treehouses. "I don't think great design is because of the amount of money spent. In fact, too much money can mean some of the worst design, some of the 'urghh' moments," she reasons.

So, how can the rest of us get the Bernerd look on a budget? "The first thing I would say to anyone is 'spring-clean' — go home and check your cupboards. Every once in a while we should have a look at how we live and move things around. Space planning is absolutely key. We think, 'Oh, we need a dining table.' Do you? If you've got a small space and you have a round table for six, could it be smaller? Do your own brief. How much space do I need for the kitchen and food area? How much do I need for sitting? How much do I need for my children?"

Her next tip is to get on Instagram, both for inspiration and to find reasonably priced replicas. "Because every single thing I can do for a luxury item — marvellous, wide wooden floorboards — my God, the roll-out vinyl wood is amazing today! I've used it before on projects where we cannot afford wood."

When it comes to painting, "there is no price on the choice of colour. And I'm quite colour-monogamous. Unless you've been doing interiors for years and you can throw in a tapestry and then add a little pinstripe in there," she says, gesturing flamboyantly. "If you have a powdery blue wall then you might put in a navy-blue sofa, you can have different tones of it — just add carefully."

Bernerd, of course, is the kind of woman who would make a pinstripe work with a tapestry anywhere.