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On Location

A London Home to Shock the Neighbors

The director Roland Emmerich asked his designer, John Teall, to make the London house “as nonfrumpy as possible.”Credit...Jonathan Player for The New York Times

FROM the outside, the director Roland Emmerich’s 1830 town house looks as buttoned-up as its neighbors in the Knightsbridge district of London, near Harrods and the Victoria and Albert Museum. But once visitors step into the living room, where a taxidermy zebra is juxtaposed with a 25-foot mural of Mao, they realize they’ve left the conservative neighborhood behind.

Mr. Emmerich, who is known for big-budget, spectacle-filled films like “10,000 BC” and “Independence Day,” bought the house in late 2004 without knowing much about the area. When friends told him that it had a reputation for being somewhat staid, he instructed his designer, John Teall, of Flux Interiors, to make the house “as nonfrumpy as possible,” he said, so that “when the neighbors peek in, they might want to call the police or something.”

Mr. Emmerich had recently returned from a trip to Shanghai with a suitcase full of Chairman Mao statues, and he asked the designer to fill the house with similar objects reflecting his predilection for art with a political edge.

After making a few basic changes to the five-story house — moving the kitchen upstairs, adding skylights and creating a 16-foot-tall glass atrium — Mr. Teall, who studied interior design at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, set about following those instructions.

For the large murals that run throughout the house, he hired the painter James Gemmill, who duplicated works of art from the Louvre for “The Da Vinci Code.” After talking to “high-end furniture makers who gave me outrageous estimates and didn’t grasp the humor of the pieces,” he said, he commissioned film prop makers to fabricate other objects, including a life-size wax statue of Pope John Paul II and dioramas with scenes of notorious events like the actor Hugh Grant’s encounter with a Hollywood prostitute and the torture that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “People can spend an entire evening discussing a film,” Mr. Teall said, explaining what some might consider obsessive attention to detail. “I liked the idea that a house might inspire the same” reaction.

For his part, Mr. Emmerich noted that “the London house has a very friendly quality.” It “started as a sort of joke,” he added, but “has become interesting — John has a wicked sense of humor.”

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