Quotes from Anouska Hempel

India. From Goa to Kerala and Mumbai, it gets me every time. It's the food, the people, and the colours. The magical atmosphere and the accepting nature of the locals.

Unless a design is infused with a personality - and by that, I mean mine or someone else who really understands what design is all about - it will never, ever have any mystery.

Sure, I'm hyperactive. I make my staff a bit hyper, too, but motivating someone else is what gives me a buzz.

I'm never short of inspiration. There are always new ideas - and new adventures.

It is not me who is to be noticed. It is my work.

The champagne tastes the same if you're sitting bolt upright or sunk back into a sofa, so you might as well be upright, because you look better.

The building I most admire is the Doges Palace in Venice, both by day and by night. Looking at it from the lagoon, it resembles a floating kilim carpet. I love all the bridges which connect houses, people, gardens and palaces. I also love moats to isolate yourself. A ha-ha for secrecy, as in every English country garden.

I feel that, historically, the Art Deco period has the most resonance for me. As a person, it has to be the plucky Clara Bow, the heroine of American silent movies of the 1920s. She embodied feminine dressing mixed with men's style. All this then evolved into the exquisite style and simplicity of Coco Chanel.

From the age of five, I was organizing everybody's everything. If I didn't like the way it looked, I'd rearrange it. From a very early age, I saw life from my point of view.

I really should have been a pharaoh - do you know that?

Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse.

Work's a way of life. It's the way you live; it's what you do, and it's how it is. It's not work. It's a lifestyle. It's life. It's what one does. You can't not work.