![\"Cindy](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Shot-22-418_RT@0.3x.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n\u2018I love maximalism and clashing patterns and never want things to look perfect. My father always told me that \u201cyou have to have a bit of black and a bit of tat\u201d, and he was completely right. Otherwise, spaces look too precious and decorated,\u2019 she says. Her view is that nowhere should be off limits in a house. \u2018I want people to walk into a room, see a sofa, throw themselves on it with a couple of dogs and put their feet up\u2019.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Cindy on the neighbouring roof terrace, which leads off of her office.<\/p>\n
Christopher Horwood<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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<\/a> and dining room<\/a>, and on the other, reached through a jib door in the dining room, is a large bedroom<\/a>, en suite bathroom and a spare bedroom. Occupying the top floor is another sitting room with views across London, and Cindy\u2019s office<\/a>-cum-studio.<\/p>\n If you happened to be reading House & Garden<\/a> 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<\/a>, 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\u2019s ever-growing and ever-changing collection of paintings. \u2018People always tell me that I couldn\u2019t possibly find space for another painting, but there\u2019s always room, even if I have to hang it on the skirting board or the back of a door,\u2019 she laughs. Similarly, the sitting room upstairs is as deeply comfortable and incredibly elegant as it always has been.<\/p>\n 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. \u2018It gave the whole room a complete facelift,\u2019 says Cindy, who ingeniously painted a layer of decorator\u2019s varnish over the top of it, making it wipeable. Bold, striped tiles interrupt the pattern in a pleasing, playful way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018I love maximalism and clashing patterns and never want things to look perfect. My father always told me…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,6642,1120,20782,96,20781,29039,21383,7888,13905,7886,7887,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-193997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-city","tag-design","tag-designers-houses","tag-entertainment","tag-flats","tag-houses-belonging-to-interesting-people","tag-houses-by-members-of-the-list","tag-houses-by-our-top-100-interior-designers-architects","tag-london-houses","tag-traditional-city","tag-traditional-houses","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}