Paolo Moschino and Philip Vergeylen’s

Paolo Moschino and Philip Vergeylen cannot help acquiring beautiful and unusual things. This may be because, as one of London’s leading interior-design teams, they are constantly sourcing the rich and rare for their clients. Or simply because, as Moschino says, “we’re both—what’s the word? Shopaholics. You see, I have lived in London for 30 years and I still cannot speak the language.”

The apartment’s most intriguing feature is its double drawing room, which is divided by a 19th-century Coromandel screen. To move from one side to the other is to travel in time: One half is glamorously 20th century, with gilt leopard-skin stools and gleaming brass-edged tables, lamps, and bookcases; the other evokes the 18th and 19th centuries, with dark pine paneling, heavy silk curtains, and a splendid cabinet of curiosities, whose contents range from branches of coral to a small marble bust. Dinner parties follow an established pattern—preprandial drinks in the modern drawing room, coffee in the antique one after the meal. “We would hate to live somewhere that was consistent throughout,” Vergeylen says. “Some people are obsessed with using the same color from room to room, but to me that shows a lack of imagination. I hope I don’t have a single style—it’s a mélange of everything.”

The apartment is continuously evolving, largely in response to the couple’s ever-growing collection of furniture and art. “You get to the point where you can’t just go on adding things,” Moschino says. “You have to make a radical change. We try to be restrained, but…”