On a quiet street in Stoke Newington, north London, is a loud flat. Not in terms of architecture or size, or because it’s filled with animals or kids — rather because its decorative decibels score high. It belongs to the 33-year-old artist Christabel MacGreevy, who, since moving in in 2021, has through colour, textiles, pattern and art made it feel as though she has been there longer than she’s been alive.
“In retrospect it’s quite peculiar,” she says of never having considered the interiors of her first non-rented home prior to getting the keys, or even what her interior style really was. Money was scarce, if it existed at all. “The only thing I could afford was paint. Luckily my boyfriend at the time was a painter-decorator and an angel,” she says, gesturing to the hand-stencilled geometric floor, the panels and the door frames in the entrance hall-cum-dining room, that are coated with no fewer than seven different colours.
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MacGreevy in her “indoor garden” lounge, which is painted in a hand-mixed shade of green. The antique chair was reupholstered in the Soane fabric Seaweed Lettuce
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Above the sofa, which is covered in a Tibetan rug, MacGreevy’s grandma’s tablecloth has been reimagined as a piece of art. The rug is Garden Maze by Nordic Knots
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MacGreevy comes from a long line of female artists who passed down their skills, as well as their belief that art was not only something you made, but also something you could — and should — build a life around. “Without them I don’t think I would have believed I could make a career out of it,” she says. Her grandmother Anthea Craigmyle, whose paintings are propped up in MacGreevy’s lounge and whose wooden sculpture is displayed in place of a television on top of a plinth, was painting until the end of her life.
Craigmyle’s story has been stitched into a Victorian lace tablecloth, a ginormous worn thing that spans the width of the lounge wall, that MacGreevy has embroidered with vintage Liberty fabric samples and the words “she knew my face indelibly”.
MacGreevy trained at Central Saint Martins, but it was during a stint at the Royal Drawing School that she honed her drawing style, which leans heavily on folklore, myth, bold lines and colour. Over time she has expanded into ceramics, which she found, like the rest of us, during lockdown. On the morning we meet she has just returned from New York’s biggest art fair, the Armory Show, where she was displaying fired and glazed stoneware ceramics. Attention now turns to Art Basel Miami Beach, where she will be exhibiting in December.
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The simple bathroom is a restful shade of light brown
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The kitchen, painted in Mikado by Papers and Paints, is filled with cermaics MacGreevy has collected from the likes of Irving & Co, Troy Town and Henry Holland Studio
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Different shades of green are layered in the living room, including this vintage lamp
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Colour is MacGreevy’s weakness. The lounge, imagined as “an indoor garden”, is painted a juicy, almost lurid, green that she hand-mixed in her studio. The sunny mustard bedroom took her five tries to crack (settling on Farrow & Ball’s Babouche). The kitchen, meanwhile, is a satsuma orange (Mikado by Papers and Paints), and the hall a teal with architraves and door frames in a sexy racing green. The chairs around her foldable 1970s table — wedding hire chairs and cheap as chips — are lacquered in a brilliant red.
She reels off art, textiles and her sprawl of stuff with oblivious nonchalance. The sconces by the bed? “Oh, a flea market in Guadalajara [Mexico].” The risograph print Arabic pamphlets came from Cairo: “I went in February and saw the pyramids for the first time.” A Tibetan rug, inherited from her grandma, covers a knackered floral sofa with bust springs that was “free to a good home, from a house sale”.
MacGreevy takes a similarly carefree approach to what fills her wall. While she admires immensely the work of her good friend Joe Sweeney, the cool crowd’s go-to artist, she admits: “I just need stuff to put on the walls.” The same goes for her own pieces: “If it’s something good, it’s probably sold, so you know this is kind of second tier, but that’s fine.”
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The dining area and hall feature hand-painted geometric floors and panelling
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MacGreevy sources items from flea markets, junk shops and antique stores
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The wooden sculpture in the living room was inherited from her grandma
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Seduced by her English eccentricity and general design prowess, the fashion photographer — and her friend — Harry Carr charged her with helping him with his house, just down the road. There are now antiques, ruffles and colour combinations so camp they require a clap. It was MacGreevy’s first shot at an interiors project in an official capacity. She’s now in demand, and needs no convincing: “Just never at the expense of my actual art,” she says, while perhaps realising that her home ranks among some of her finest works.