Anna is able to snatch two or three things from the boundless sea of faceless, identical, serial things, which are enough to combine together to get a new meaning, emotion, atmosphere, add new content to her life and look at herself with different eyes. All this is now included in the powers of the decorator.

Anna’s words:”We all know what qualities a decorator needs: observation, taste. But in your case, it’s probably also courage. To combine a piece of Asian fabric, a bust of Lenin and a floor lamp designed by Achille Castiglioni into one composition and add to this a pair of some plastic dolls.

It seems to me that the customer should have the courage. If there is no such happiness as a brave customer, the decorator will have to work for himself.

Decorating is such a forced story, when you plan a room, then you realize it, and here it is so ready and empty, but people have a desire to clutter it up or complete it, and they ask for help with this. I used to do it hard, for a long time, searching for various little things, because ten years ago it was difficult to find decor in Russia. The Siematic kitchen could be bought right away, but the decor had to be searched for. But I tried as best I could to bring each of my objects to completion and spared no effort in the search. Then this job of mine grew into a craft, and it became easy for me. What you see now is acquired in the process of practice.

My parents are musicians. Dad is a vocal teacher, mom is a piano teacher, I “worked out” seven years of music school, seven years of concert choir, and when I entered an economic university, my mother was very shy to tell her friends about it. When I worked as an accountant while studying at the institute, my mother was horrified: is there an accountant in our family? Then it became clear that I needed a job where I didn’t have to go for five days. As a child, I wanted to become a fashion designer, but I did not want to go into the fashion design that existed in Russia in the 1990s. In 2000, I noticed that a new profession had appeared — an interior designer, and I went to study design, but I couldn’t sit at the institute either — I went “to the fields” to study construction. I wanted to know what drywall looks like alive, how the walls are built and how do I paint them. Four of my classmates from the Institute of Design and Advertising, which I never graduated from, work in design, we have been dating for seventeen years now — we are the ones who survived both yellow-blue sofas and plasterboard ceilings, we tried all this and began to jump further.”

Anna is a world-class designer, a hunter of old decor and antiques. Her friend helped her make the first carpet, it was made of pieces of leather and thread.

For her, Berlin is associated with window fittings. “If you need to find any espagnolettes, go to Berlin. The hardware is sold in bags there.”

For Anna, Paris is now a place where everything is very expensive. The French have their own fashion, the trends are purely French, but rich British and Americans buy them. The French themselves do not buy anything at Paris fleas. I like something else in Paris, something that can be seen in art galleries. She sent her most beloved, advanced customers to those galleries that she liked, but they didn’t buy anything there.

Parisian artists are very fond of metal products and animal corpses. Now Anna is delighted with these things and is very glad that the Hermitage gave Jan Fabre the opportunity to exhibit, looked at his things in Holland and admired.

“Burma, Laos, in general, the whole of Asia, it’s cool in textiles, but all this is now available at H&M Home, there’s no point in going so far because of this. Ten years ago, there was nothing, every blanket was valuable, but now everything is there. Where I would like to dig around to create a large volume — not an apartment, but a room, say, several thousand meters — is Bali. I would rummage there in the doorways, on the ruins, where there is a large size, a lot of stone, wood, shells, a lot of atmosphere. But you can’t cram this atmosphere into our volumes. Unfortunately, there are still few high volumes in Russia.

I have so many desires, so many desires… I really like to pick and stack, and I can do it for many hours a day. And just five days. Now there is a big, crazy choice for everything. When I walk into a light store, anyone on the sidelines, I realize that I can put together a bunch of mixes in two hours.”