What do Vincent van Gogh, Ronald McDonald, and Sabine Getty have in common? “I just love yellow,” gesticulates the latter in our unlikely aesthetic trio. We’re standing in Getty’s Happy Meal of an entrance hall, in the 19th-century London townhouse the 39-year-old moved into with her 35-year-old husband, Joseph, and two children, Gene, six, and Jupiter, four, in 2022. Its walls are swathed in a retina-searing paintbox yellow and Getty’s bare feet sink into the ketchupy Sinclair Till carpet. A red and yellow metal Getty Oil sign, which Joseph picked up from a gas station in Providence while studying at Brown University in 2011 (his great-grandfather, Jean Paul Getty Sr, was the famed petrol tycoon), greets you as you walk through the (you guessed it) yellow front door. “I was worried the hall might look too McDonald’s or In-N-Out Burger,” Getty says, smiling between sips of Diet Coke. “But I love it.”
Getty grew up in Geneva dreaming in daring hues. As we turn into the ground living and library space—two vast curtain-separated adjoining rooms, which were formerly “all white, with zero spirit”—she points out two vivid side tables by ’80s Memphis group designer Michele De Lucchi, flanking a colour blocked cotton sofa that used to border the bed she slept in as a child. The welcoming space is a cacophony of color, print, and texture, populated with reupholstered family heirlooms and French antique chandeliers, contemporary canvases in abstract blues by Victoria de Lesseps, and Paul Evans’s patchwork cabinetry. Getty references David Hicks, the daring British interior designer, as an enduring influence. “He was very elegant and chic but unafraid of clashing things,” she says. When the family moved in, a Hicksification commenced: ’70s-inspired smoky mirrors were installed, walls were paneled, the front room painted in what Getty coins “hardcore black” and the entire rear “hangout room” swathed in emerald velvet.
