London Pride

Ditch the chintz, embrace the chinoiserie – Dimore Studio’s house for fashion stars Dean and Dan Caten goes for the globe-trotting gold

- MITCHELL OWENS

We wanted traditional London – modern isn’t what we were looking for, Dan Caten says. It’s a comment that startles a bit, considering that Dsquared2, the fashion label that he and his brother Dean founded more than two decades ago, has always been more rock ‘n’ roll than royalty. Instead, the Canadian-born identical twins – close-cropped silver hair, bold eyewear, whippet-thin physiques, and a habit of completing each other’s sentences – wanted a classic example of local real estate but on their own terms. So they went looking in a west London area that Tatler once called ‘mistressy and the fact cannot be avoided’: Maida Vale, where Italianate houses painted the color of clotted cream have hosted kept women and infamous sex scandals since the 19th century.

One of those stolid buildings, facing Regent’s Canal in the Maida Vale enclave of Little Venice, is now the Catens’ own. Appropriately enough, given the inhabitants, it’s a semidetached, one-half of mirror-image residences built around 1830. (Actress Anjelica Huston lived next door as a teenager.) Despite the location, though, there is not a single Anglo signifier in its revamped rooms – no chintz, no Chippendale, no rus in urbe cheerfulness. That comes as little surprise, given that the Catens asked friends Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran of Milan’s Dimore Studio to decorate the house with the same cinematic moodiness that the firm brought to Ceresio 7, the celebrity-magnet bar and restaurant that crowns Dsquared2’s headquarters in the same Italian city.