Interiors

Welcome to my pleasure dome

Deep, deep shag pile, Bond-style gadgets and two-way mirrors ... Simon Mills takes a look around the classic playboy pad of casino boss Tom Breitling

When you are young, rich and answerable to nobody, with a design sense based on hedonistic playtime rather than level-headed practicality, all conventional wisdom goes out of the window.

A bachelor pad is engineered for results, not for domestic harmony. This is interior design with something of the night about it; the art of the pristinely maintained, uncompromisingly macho, anally-retentive, deep-shag-pile den of iniquity; home as an entertainment facility.

Take the Las Vegas apartment whose co-owner is Tom Breitling, 34, the vigorously single owner of the Golden Nugget casino. With panoramic views of the Strip, it was designed by Michael Czysz, the interiors magus responsible for another famous bachelor pad — Lenny Kravitz’s orgasmatronic crib in Miami.

Breitling’s 4,300 sq ft home is school of Marc Newson by way of Marc Bolan: a shameless celebration of bachelor-apartment clichés, with witty, 21st-century fixtures all wired up with bespoke techno toys. There are 10 plasma-screen televisions, including screens in the loos. Large two-way mirrors separate the master bedroom from the living area (use your imagination), the shag-pile carpet is Manolo-drowningly deep and the bathrooms are fitted with Korean riot police-strength power showers.

Some ideas didn’t make it, however. “We left out the lap-dancing bar,” says the designer. “For a businessman like Tom, who makes deals worth millions, we thought it was a bit too much.”

Of course, there is nothing new about all this. The bachelor apartment is an enduring classic that, apart from a few technical tweaks, has remained pretty much unchanged since its 1960s blueprint. Back then, Peter Sellers had a London bachelor pad equipped with the UK’s first-ever electric bathroom taps and remote-operated curtains. And Stirling Moss designed his own plush and painstakingly flush Mayfair duplex, which bore not one single exposed screw head. Even the light fittings and door hinges had invisible fixings.

The new generation’s pads are revving up these men’s pioneering living concepts with a bit of state-of-the-art circuitry. For example, there’s a particular feature in Dan Macmillan’s impressive Vauxhall penthouse that epitomises the gorgeously silly, self-indulgent, high-tech nonsense of the bachelor pad. It’s not the Japanese teak bath, or the disorientating hall with its concealed front door. It’s not the pop-up television in the bedroom, or, indeed, the mind-warping “light-box room” with illuminated floor, ceiling and walls. It’s the light switches.

Let me explain. When Macmillan — artist, fashion designer, ubiquitous adulte terrible and impish social deviant — asked his friend Tom Bartlett to design the ultimate playboy apartment, he was quite specific about what he wanted. And, like any young gun with a huge ego, libido and bank account, he namechecked James Bond and Hugh Hefner. He wanted to bring a bit of upscale Las Vegas ring-a-ding-ding to grey south London.

He demanded several plasma-screen televisions, a Krakatoa-like sound system, custom-made sofas and superslick kitchen units. “It was a nightmare, because it was so technically specific,” says Bartlett, whose portfolio includes Jade Jagger’s house in Ibiza and the Garrard store in London. “I had to learn about gadgetry, televisions and intelligent lighting. All Dan’s light switches were named after Bond villains.”

“Bachelors are very pleasure-orientated,” says Tara Bernerd, of Target Living, who is currently designing a new apartment for men about town Ben Elliot and Jamie Poulton. “Aesthetics take precedence over practical demands.” There’s a big emphasis on mood lights, screening rooms, catering-standard gadgets (“even though most guys never cook”), lacquered finishes and stainless-steel worktops. Bernerd has even fitted mirror balls.

Such finicky detail may be a pain to source, but playboys, insist the designers, make perfect clients: “The relief is that you don’t have a woman to deal with,” says the celebrated interior designer Nicky Haslam, who can count the eternal bachelor Mick Jagger as one of his customers. “Single men let one get on with it. Quite often, they are not even in the same country while the work is in progress. And, usually, they are starting with a clean slate. You don’t have to work around any existing possessions or pieces. Everything — furniture, art, kitchens, fixtures and fittings and so on — is bought brand new. Pretty much anything that has acquired a patina of age is a no-no.”

Haslam, who has just completed a flat for a London banker (“whose main possession was a collection of 400 leather jackets by Prada”), acknowledges that, for a single man, instant gratification is key when it comes to his living space. “It has to be immediately wonderful when he returns from a business trip or a late night,” he says. “He doesn’t want to plump cushions or rearrange the curtains. Sleek surfaces and plain fabrics are the thing. Everything must look tidy. Bachelors may have dirty minds, but most are total clean queens when it comes to their hygiene, you know.”

-SIMON MILLS