1The Londoner atAroundTown | October 1, 2024SoMimiMott Spills SecretsGavels at the ready! After the shock announcement that interiors queen Mimi Mott is selling her legendary estate, news of a forthcoming memorabilia auction, A Life in Objects, has collectors and gossip columns buzzing. The famously private style icon plans “a car boot sale of house and heart.”
“Contrary to wicked rumors, I’ve still got a pulse,” says Mott, who admits she has barely left her Upper East Side apartment since her husband died more than a year ago. She decamps to London next week. “But my old life has gone. It feels like the right time to relinquish its trappings and finally tell my story, on the off chance anyone’s still interested in a dinosaur like me.”
Well, form an orderly queue. With Mott, it’s always been a case of If you know, you know.
A late-twentieth-century tastemaker and decorator to the stars, Mott made her name—and her fortune—with Mimi’s House, the brand that was to eighties interiors what Biba was to sixties fashion. Think English country pile meets Hamptons chic. And it’s having a moment, with the hashtag, SoMimiMott, running hot on the socials.
The sale of Mott’s real estate (Nantucket beach house, anyone?) is set to draw serious money. Important pieces from a lifetime’s collection of art, rare textiles, and furniture are destined for museums and public institutions. But it’s the self-curated selection of personal things—“Just stuff,” according to Mott—that promises to lay bare the true story of her life and finally put to rest years of speculation and rumor.
A Life in Objects will be hosted by boutique Mayfair auctioneer Lordats, with proceeds going to charity. Beg, borrow, or blag an invite to the December preview party, folks.
“Yes, it’s quite the project, but I could do with one right now,” Mott tells atAroundTown’s insider. “I also need a Girl Friday in London. Someone to help me decide what to put in, what to leave out, and what to hide, naturally.”
2JoChelsea, London, five weeks laterJo plucks out her AirPods and checks the building number against the improbable address on her phone; the email, read so many times, makes less sense, not more. Her breath mists in the chilled morning air.
Only three stone steps separate them now. She shakes drizzle from her curls—rowdy, red-squirrel brown—then rummages under her coat to straighten her midi skirt, the smart one from Vinted that suddenly feels not nearly smart enough. Her rain-pocked preppy loafers don’t belong on this Chelsea street either. Last night’s emergency super-glue intervention on the left sole is already coming undone.
Craning back, she gazes up at the terrace, the balustrade balcony, the potted olive and bay trees. Nearby, a blacked-out Merc idles, its jacketed driver waiting. A young dog-walker dashes past, tethered to six whatever-poos in paint-chart colors. No old bangers here. No mutts. Even the sun glints through the clouds like the metallic thread in a fifty-pound note.
This is not Jo’s world. Not her London. She can’t imagine any vaguely normal human activity taking place behind its elegant façade. Certainly not the late-night scoffing of Kettle Chips over a laptop, searching for any missed biographical intel about Mimi Mott.
Doubt jabs again. Despite all her preparation—design tomes in the library, back issues of
ELLE Décor, World of Interiors, Architectural Digest, trips to the V&A archives—she feels woefully unprepared. Until now, the job interview, even Mimi’s existence, had felt theoretical.
She’d never expected to get this far.
Fighting the urge to bolt back to the Tube, Jo checks the time, walks up the steps and, heart pounding, presses the buzzer, leaving a damp fingerprint whorl on the polished brass. “Jo O’Mara, here about the assistant job?” She didn’t mean it to spill out like a question.
“And not even thirty seconds late.” A woman’s voice. Well-spoken English, with a husky, thespian depth.
Is that her?
“First floor. Lift if you’re feeling lazy.”
Jo’s many things but not lazy, so she hurries up the marble staircase, hand on the wrought-iron balustrade, trying not to clomp, too used to living in Adidas Sambas. At the apartment door, she tugs a stray curl from a gold hoop earring and fixes a smile, but it catches on her drying mouth—that way-too-big, goofy smile she’s always had—making her self-conscious about her overbite. Listening to the churn of locks, she steels. The door swings open.
The man on the other side also starts slightly, as if she doesn’t meet his expectations either. Powerfully built, with wavy dark hair and a rough-hewn face, mid-thirties. Informal navy suit, white T-shirt, subtle trainers. She wonders if he’s some sort of bodyguard.
“Good morning, Jo.” A London accent. A big-man voice with the volume turned down. His gaze warm, interrogative. “I’m Woody. Come in.”
Jo thanks him too profusely, and steps into the entrance hall. A soaring antique mirror throws back her reflection: too tall, all elbows and legs, wild-eyed and bushy-haired, half throttled by an extra-long stripy scarf that isn’t giving quite the bookish Parisian vibe she’d intended. On a console table, a pair of classical urns, big as buckets, overflow with ferns and white roses, sweetening the air. Above, a square yellow-and-pink screenprint of . . . Mimi. Warhol. Signed. Jeez.
“May I take your coat . . . that scarf?”
“Oh, yes! Thanks. Sorry, it’s a bit . . .” She grapples with the wooly anaconda around her neck, feeling herself breaking into a sweat.
“No rush.” He suppresses a smile. “Take your time.”
Jo delivers it to his spade-like hand, then slips off her coat carefully, trying to hide the unsightly rip in its lining. Spotting a pair of midnight-blue velvet slippers on the herringbone parquet sparks fresh panic. Should she remove her shoes? She’s worrying whether her opaque tights are up to it when movement draws her eye. Jo inhales sharply.
There. She. Is.
Mimi Mott is both tinier than expected and larger than life. Pin-thin, a paparazzo snap made flesh. Pinterest boards, Google searches, the star of the cult art house doc Mimi’s Rooms, three-dimensional, striding toward her, radiating a crackling forcefield and an understated Katharine Hepburn glamour.
Palazzo trousers, navy, a perfect pleat, tan suede flat pumps nosing out at the bottom. A gray cashmere vest over a get-shit-done white shirt, big mannish cuffs. Pearls. A chunky gold cuff on a birdlike wrist. Short, layered hair, that expensive ash-silver blond. Lively eyes, robin’s-egg blue, undimmed by age. Suspiciously smooth skin stretched over good bones. A compelling face, with that ageless surgical thing going on, although she must be somewhere in her mid-seventies.
Brought up to distrust the wealthy, with their outsize carbon footprints, their tax-dodging and selective ethics, Jo tries not to be intimidated. Not to believe in the fairy dust. Yet the air around Mimi Mott really does seem to shimmer. It’s hard to look away.
“Ah, Jo,” she says, with a smile.
“Lovely to meet you, Ms. Mott.” She instantly regrets the pedestrian word, lovely.
“Mimi, please.” Her handshake is quick, firm, her skin surprisingly soft.
Jo hears herself mutter, “Mimi,” under her breath, like the starstruck fan she’s not. Maybe she holds that hand a fraction too long, searching the familiar, unfamiliar face, trying to work out if Mimi’s heart is stuffed with dollars and damasks. Or something more human.
“Coffee?” Woody asks. “Water? Water it is. Mimi, your usual? I’ll let Ruth know.”
Instinctively following his gaze down the corridor, Jo glimpses a black skirt, a sturdy calf, a flash of a broom, and feels a tug of kinship with the hardworking backroom staff. Not the high-wattage woman sprinkled with diamonds.
As Woody strides away, he glances back with a small double take, and Jo fears she looks guilty, or the sort to nick a candlestick.
“Shall we chat in here?” Mimi says, nodding at a doorway. Not a question.
Only then does it strike Jo, with a breath-stealing jolt, that Mimi Mott’s hornet’s nest of a past probably shouldn’t be prodded. Least of all by herself.
Copyright © 2026 by Eve Chase. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
