Claudia Kalur once had the run of The Met on a Monday, when the museum was closed and the Egyptian wing was hers to walk through in silence. She spent more than six years there, in the Department of Egyptian Art, working alongside Egyptologists whose books she had read as an undergraduate in Lisbon. It was, by any measure, a dream. And she left it, for fabric and floor plans and a company called CFK Interiors, whose work is now described as pristine, timeless, and tailored. Getting there meant admitting that walking away from one dream is not the same as failing at it.
A fabric inheritance
She is from Portugal, “a country over 800 years old,” and her father filled her childhood with it, dragging her round museums, churches, and monasteries. “As a child I sometimes found it boring, but they developed my curiosity. They awakened a love for art and architecture, and the stories within them.” From her father came something else too: a love of fabric. He was a rep for mills in the north of Portugal that wove men’s suiting wools, pinstripe and plaid, and Claudia grew up among swatches. “I always loved when some fabrics were discontinued and I could keep the samples.”
A degree in History of Art in Lisbon took her to London for a masters in Egyptian Archaeology at UCL, then through the Egypt Exploration Society, the British Museum, and the Royal Academy, where she watched curators build exhibitions from behind the scenes. “Some of my fondest memories are of standing in the galleries with the art handlers, watching pieces being installed.” Then came the internship at The Met, and the full-time job that followed.
A double life
Interiors had always been there, quietly. “I’ve been buying interior magazines since I was thirteen or fourteen,” she says. There were none in Portugal then, so her first was the Spanish El Mueble. It never occurred to her it could be a job. What changed was her husband, a private aircraft broker who, after they redid two apartments, went back to school for a masters in architecture. “He started bringing home floor plans, and we would discuss room layouts, and that awakened the idea that I could maybe do this for a living.”
She started a diploma in interior design while still at the Met. “My job was research-based, so studying felt natural. The diploma was a distraction.” As she grew disillusioned at work and more excited by furniture and fabric, the idea of a real career change began to solidify, slowly. “I lived a double life for a couple of years. I only told my husband and one friend at the Met. It was hard to quit something I had worked toward for so long. For a while I saw it as defeat. I saw it as giving up.”
Leaving a career she loved felt like defeat. It was not.
Starting, shyly
A stint at the shop Privet House taught her the commercial side, buying antiques and vintage, meeting designers she admired. But the shop had no plans to offer design services, and she wanted to design, not just sell beautiful things. She had just had her daughter and needed paying work, with no runway to intern at a firm. So she started her own company and, “very, very shyly,” offered services to friends, then friends of friends. The projects came. “My first two were zero-fee, in exchange for photos for my portfolio.”
What she carried out of the museums turned out to be the whole foundation. Egyptology had trained her to see. “You spend hours looking at pieces to understand the details, the nuances, so you can understand a period, a method, the story behind it. That helps me zone in on a detail and also step back and see what works when putting a space together.” She thinks constantly about flow, the way curators guide people through an exhibition, and about method, “fundamental whether you are researching an article, an exhibition label, or a design.”
Her one regret is timing. “I wish I had moved sooner, so I could have worked for and learned from other designers. We’ve stopped appreciating the value of an apprenticeship.” Had she switched while still in England, she says, she would have begged for one at Colefax & Fowler or Nina Campbell. On the bucket list now: the interiors of a boutique hotel or a historic inn, and a project in the pages of House & Garden. She still misses the museums terribly. One day, when there is time, she would like to study museology, purely as a hobby.
CFK Interiors is at cfkinteriors.com and @cfkinteriors.
