‘I love maximalism and clashing patterns and never want things to look perfect. My father always told me that “you have to have a bit of black and a bit of tat”, and he was completely right. Otherwise, spaces look too precious and decorated,’ she says. Her view is that nowhere should be off limits in a house. ‘I want people to walk into a room, see a sofa, throw themselves on it with a couple of dogs and put their feet up’.
Cindy on the neighbouring roof terrace, which leads off of her office.
Christopher Horwood
This sensibility is perfectly evident in her own flat, which she shares with her husband, the landscape designer John Leveson. From pictures, it could easily be mistaken for a classic country house, but in fact the lateral, labyrinth-like space stretches across the top two floors of two late Victorian red-bricks in south London. Cindy bought the first side in the late eighties, and snapped up the second just a few years later, knocking through and reconfiguring the spaces: on one side is a little kitchen, a sitting room, bathroom and dining room, and on the other, reached through a jib door in the dining room, is a large bedroom, en suite bathroom and a spare bedroom. Occupying the top floor is another sitting room with views across London, and Cindy’s office-cum-studio.
If you happened to be reading House & Garden in September 2001, you will already be familiar with the flat, and such is the brilliance of truly timeless design, you will also be familiar with much of its decoration. Save for a lick of paint, many of the spaces remain as they were twenty five years ago. In the sitting room, a now discontinued Noblis toile wallpaper acts as a backdrop to Cindy’s ever-growing and ever-changing collection of paintings. ‘People always tell me that I couldn’t possibly find space for another painting, but there’s always room, even if I have to hang it on the skirting board or the back of a door,’ she laughs. Similarly, the sitting room upstairs is as deeply comfortable and incredibly elegant as it always has been.
The kitchen, however, has recently seen a transformation. Gone are the white walls and dark blue gingham curtains, replaced with a bright, floral wallpaper from Antoinette Poisson. ‘It gave the whole room a complete facelift,’ says Cindy, who ingeniously painted a layer of decorator’s varnish over the top of it, making it wipeable. Bold, striped tiles interrupt the pattern in a pleasing, playful way.