HOUSE TOUR | The Enchanting London Townhouse of Cook Book Author Skye McAlpine

hi home wavi I'm sky this is my home in London come on [Music] in you're watching homeworthy where we believe every home has a story like And subscribe for more [Music] hi I'm Sky McAlpine and today we're in my home in London um which is a Victorian townhouse in Southwest London near the park um five stories so it's very tall with lots of stairs it's really good exercise going up and down the stairs I live here with my husband and Anthony and our two boys inas who's 10 almost 11 years old and Akil who is four I read Classics at University so I um I've always had a soft spot for um classical literature so they they're two great um or two of the great um Greek and Roman Heroes so an is the founder of Rome and Akil is just the Italian for Achilles um the Greek hero so they're I just thought they were really beautiful names so I am a cookery writer or I started as a cookery writer so I write cookbooks and I develop recipes um and contribute to magazines and um various platforms online and two years ago nearly now I launched my own table Weare range as well so now I'm also a small small business owner so I've I grew up in Italy I grew up in Venice um and so it's impossible I think to grow up in Italy and not love food um so I've always been very greedy and I've always enjoyed good food and good meals um but I think I also I was very lucky that I grew up in a home where food always meant more than you know it was always more than just the sum of ingredients it was always more than lunch or dinner it was always an opportunity to bring together friends and family or new friends old friends it's always kind of a very social moment a very happy moment in the day um so I think that's where my passion for cooking for others and for bringing people together around the table really started from and then everything else kind of stem from there so the cookbooks and the table toop that's all kind of like an extension they're all kind of pieces in in the puzzle well welcome to my hallway um it's very small and narrow and it leads straight onto the kitchen and the living room so we didn't really have too much to work with with this space but we wanted it to feel still kind of quite special and very welcoming um so the starting point was this wallpaper um which is hand painted by this wonderful artist called Alis the Peebles who our friend um Ben pentry found for us and we came up with the design together so it's inspired by antique um Swedish wallpaper and then when aliser was painting it he wanted to incorporate elements that were kind of Representative of it in some way captured the spirit of me and my husband so my husband loves birds so we have all these beautiful birds and then I love um fruits so there are pomegranates and lemons as well um in the wallpaper um so it feels it's it's very very special for us and so that kind of is sort of big impact element of the hallway and it leads all the way up the stairs to the living room and then we needed a table but it's a really narrow space um so we wanted to get kind of like a half moon Half Moon table to sort of create that sense of hallway and also somewhere to just pop all our bits like I have this lovely antique um brass basket where I just kind of put all the keys and and clutter um so we found this one add Antiques Market and it's just a simple marble top and then a kind of really pretty um ornate wooden carved um design around the edges and then I just kind of try and fill it with a mixture of useful things like keys and wallets and sunglasses and hair bands like those kind of things that you like grabbing when you're dashing outside of the doorway um but also like I like to have flowers in the hall away this is a really beautiful vase ceramic 1920s vase that my husband Anthony gave me for my birthday this year and I absolutely love it and it's really clever it's kind of got these little holes inside it so you can kind of put the flowers and it holds them in a really pretty Arrangement um and then we have all our little pictures um I love this one of Aila youngest that his Godfather gave us in this beautiful antique frame so it's kind of cute this here um and then kind of it I also keep you know whenever we get given letters or if I host the dinner and there's a me menu or something kind of a momento of evening I like to keep those as well and when people sweetly come for dinner and send us thank you notes always keep those and these are so beautiful this is um a friend of ours who's um Matthew Rice is an incredibly talented illustrator and he sent us very sweetly adorably thank than you note and he kind of Illustrated the envelope um so it looks like the steps U our front steps um yeah oh and then I also love uh this lamp which is a stalk um so we found it in an Antiques Market in brussles and it's a it's a stalk kind of bird which I think is quite cute and then it had I got it rewired and then added this really beautiful hand painted um lamp shade from Rosie duu who I love I just love her designs I think she's incredibly clever and this is just like a sort of pop of color that sort of very lightly picks up the the sort of Dusty red of the of the pomegranates and the wallpaper one of the things that I love about this house is that it's an old house it's a Victorian house um so it has kind of really good um bones I'd say you know lovely High tall ceilings um kind of a nice sort of architectural structure to it um but when when we bought the house it had been developed by a property developer I think probably in the 1990s and most of the kind of the charm had been sort of ripped out of it and kind of it had a very modern kitchen and um very modern bathrooms um the fireplaces had been taken out um there were no cores it had kind of very contemporary flooring um so it really kind of um and it had been quite cheap done as well so it really lacked soul but the sort of outside of the house and the sort of structure the bones of the house were were magical um and so we kind of knew that it had such potential so we worked with a really good friend and completely uh brilliant brilliant architect uh called Ben pentri who um very sweetly worked with us to kind of put some inject some magic back into the house so when we were talking about how the house how we wanted the house to feel I kind of the things that were important for me was like lots of light and that was one of the things that the house already had these kind of big Windows it was naturally very light but lots of color and to feel very cozy um and kind of comfy and like kind of always been lived in um and also welcoming and you know for the kitchen space needed of course to work for me um because I work there um when I'm developing recipes um as well as like when we're having supper there as a family but also um you know I I've never knowingly said no to a party I love a good party um so we kind of also built the kitchen or designed the kitchen in such a way that it's a very flexible space and you can kind of move things around and have 20 or 30 people over for dinner when when we want to and now this is my favorite room room come with me this is the kitchen come dining room come homework station come Tava table wear Design Station it's kind of where everything happens um so this when we bought the house this was kind of two rooms and the kitchen was actually down this end where we now have the dining room and over here they had a sort more of a dining area and we kind of Knocked through to make it kind of m a kind of really big light space so you can get the light from from both sides um and it was a really big project we kind of put we put the floors in and we put the cores in and the antique Murado um chandeliers so it kind of was very very very different when we first got the keys to the house so this is our dining table um so it's I think you comfortably seat about 12 and then if we have a big party I add extension on so you can kind of have a table that goes all the length of the room um and this is an I think it's an antique French one we found it again at a um antiques uh store and it's it's very beaten up and it's slightly warped and very gnarly but I quite like that because I think wood kind of becomes more beautiful and more characterful with age um so here we are laid up for dinner um these plates are ones that I created for my table wear collection Tava and they're called the leor plates and they're named after the beach in Venice is called the leor and that's kind of like my happy summer place but the inspiration for them is you can see they come in pink and in yellow and I like mixing them together and the inspiration for them is this kitchen so as you can see the kitchen is yellow um which is my favorite color but inside my other favorite color is pink so inside the drawers we kind of went for a sort of strawberry ice cream pink um so I kind of loved that the the plates reflect the kitchen in a way um and they sort of work perfectly in this space and you can kind of see as well like we've got kind of pink candy stripe curtains um over here and then we decided to paint the frames of the window yellow as well to kind of just pop and match and match the kitchen these are all plates on my window sill so these are all um samples from Tava or plates that I've bought from Tava uh just for myself because I love them so much but we filled so we have this massive cabinet that we bought in Brussels in an an at an Antiques Market and then had reconditioned so we sort of had it repainted um it was like a sort of black black and then so we sort of painted it a a light shade of gray um with this sort of delicate green edging that sort of slightly picks up on the chairs and then we lined it with this um really I love quite s 1950s Style antoanet pessant and wallpaper that I'm a big fan of and then this is just like the most amazing thing we've ever bought because it's just I thought it was an infinite amount of storage and it is a lot a lot of storage but somehow I managed to um have more plates than we could fit in here okay so for example this plate here is the inspiration for the blue and white Tutti Frutti plate and this is I think 1950s or 1960s um British exposed uh polka dot um and you can see there's this adorable like blue trim with the blue polka dots um so this is very much the inspiration for the Tutti Frutti plates I found this at a flea market then had like four um so I kind of then wanted to make a version of this that I could have a whole table full of and hopefully other people could enjoy in their homes as well so everything kind of comes with its story or has a story and I love to mix and match vintage and um new and even when something's new I kind of love it to have a story or a reason why it kind of behind behind the design I mean these for example this is a set that I absolutely love and dying to reimagine in some way F Tava it's just got this very chic um blue and actually they come in blue and in turquoise I kind of got like six of one and eight of the other um this kind of almost like a almost like sub nautical rope around the edge but I just think they're so pretty it's just such a simple detail um but quite distinctive and very happy like it's a really sort of strong poppy happy color I mean it depends who you're talking to if my husband were here I'd have to say that I have reached my limit and I have stopped buying plates but given that he's not um I'll give you the honest answer which is yeah no I I love I love them I mean I kind of I love it's nice to have different plates for different occasions um and you know I do love having big parties so I actually do part of kind of making it simpler and easier and more fun to entertain is actually having all the pieces that you need so you're not kind of like when I used to do it I'd borrow some from my mother and then borrow some from a friend and this and that now I have enough that like we can kind of host as many people as as we like and you can kind of really change up the mood of the table very easily and I just think it's such a simple way of bringing joy into your life like I kind of love if I'm having breakfast and I have it on a really pretty plate that suits my mood makes me feel kind of special and then suddenly like my toast and jam just feels that little bit more exciting I feel like I've got that down pat now um because I love doing it so I do it probably far far too often um but um I I I kind of prepare everything in advance and um you know I've got my my second cookbook actually a table for friends was all about this idea it's all recipes that you can cook easily whether it's for two or for 20 people and how to plan a meal um when when you're kind of catering for large so that you can actually enjoy the party too and have a fun time rather than kind of be slaving away in the kitchen going quietly insane um from stress and and and exhaustion so I mean I I keep it very very simple I do lots of like big salads or big bowls of maybe grains or um quite often I'll do something like you know cold roast beef that I can prepare in advance and then just slice or um you know some nice big roast chickens or something like that or a pantanella you know kind of with the which is sort of just torn bread with maybe fresh tomatoes and a bit of fennel in there and some fresh hubs and some olive oil so like really simple simple things so this is one of my favorite things in this kitchen this collection of copper molds um which I've built up over years um and they're all different sort of as you can see lots of different shapes um and ages and actually so they will have slightly different kind of text textures and patterns and colorings but I quite like that and I use them for cooking um I'll use them to make jellies to make panacotta um some even like this one I love this one's so cute with a Little Teapot on top is really cute like if you butter it you can make kind of bunt cake you know like a nice sort of spongy cake in there um but I also like for storage I sort of have them on the wall and they double as decoration and my absolute favorite I mean I don't like to play favorites but my absolute favorite is the Pussycat up there that you can see that a friend sent me and she found it um in a shop and very sweetly knew that I would love it and I'm obsessed and um sometimes I make jelly in it and one time this was my proudest proudest moment I made like a sort of black velvet jelly so it was um Guinness and a little bit of um PR I think it mixan um so it was black so it's like a black cat but then we did I did set cream for the little nose and the little pores and the tip of the tail so it had like little white nose and feet and and tail tip so it looked like a black cat um for Halloween so anyway I that's my that's my absolute favorite but I I love them all very much I love the cherries too um this is yeah my favorites and then over here I also have that I'm obsessed with this is something that we designed for Tava we call it the Aurora box and it looks like a stack of plates but it's actually a secret box and I genuinely find this the most useful thing to have in the kitchen they just fill it with clutter I mean there's like the boy suits in there we've got some matches Keys usually there are like coins cables phone chargers all sorts of ugly bits and Bobs and you can just sort of Tidy them away in there um and it looks quite pretty but also it's quite funny because like quite of sometimes I'll have a friend over and they'll like come over be like I'm just going to grab a plate and they think it's stack of plates but it's not secret book so I love that and then this is kind of the main part of the kitchen The Hub being our cooker which is lon and huge um and yet I still run out of oven space occasionally but it's one two two double ovens and a small oven and then then a warming oven and a lot of Hobs I've never run out of Hobs but I have run out of oven space um but um this is the dream to cook with I must say at our old flat we bought a secondhand small lot cooker and we were there for 15 years and it like I loved cooking on it every single day so when we moved in here and we were doing the new kitchen I knew instantly the one thing that I really wanted was a really big big one of these and so this kind of was the beginning of the design for the kitchen because we had this huge cooker that we needed to sort of somehow fit in um and then everything else was kind of built around that I mean I have a very very sweet tooth so I'm not going to lie I love baking cakes um and I actually the thing I probably love the most and for this you really need time so it's for those moments like when I do have time but I love making a birthday cake so whether it's for you know my sons or for myself or for my husband or for friends I just the best the greatest privilege in the world I think is to make someone a birthday cake it's such a sort of celebratory moment it's really fun to make cuz I you know I'm I'm quite greedy so I'll kind of like take a you know a SP I'll happily lick the spoon or lick the bowl once we're done um but it's a really fun thing to bake and then it's such a kind of like rewarding and celebratory kind of um dish to share with others so the other thing that I love about this kitchen I mean there's lots I love about this kitchen but is this kitchen island which is an old workman's table that we I found it online um and bought secondhand and then we had it reconditioned so we changed the top to be marble so it kind of picked up and matches the marble worktops in the rest of the kitchen and then we added on the wheels so you can kind of wheel it around so if I'm it makes the space super flexible so for example if we're hosting a big party I can kind of wheel this out onto the Terrace and then put trestles in here or you know if I'm cooking um and shooting I can kind of move it over to a different corner of the kitchen and I love the space being flexible I think that works really well for us and then here we have most of our a lot of our food storage which is in jars and these open shelves and the shelves are made out of old cheeseboards so when we bought them they already had like a lovely patterner and texture to them didn't kind of feel too new and Jazzy and then we added on these hooks to hang all our mugs this is my strawberry mug that we did for Tava that's with a lovely kind of like braided handle that I love but I've also like collected other random ones over the years like Christmas mugs and then um these are some mugs that I designed for anthropology a few years ago um so yeah I love drinking tea from a mug I always start the day with a mug of tea so I love my mugs so I don't know what the right way to make tea is but I'm very lazy about it and I kind of normally I'll just have a kind of tea bag um and I add a splash milk and some and some sugar but if I'm having friends joining me for like 11's or morning tea then I will put special tea in the teapot and use a strainer um and usually use teacups rather than mugs um but not always sometimes it's just nice to drink from a mug because it's very cozy and com comforting to drink from a mug and then here we have our big sink and we've got two dishwashers one and two that one is now going to keep opening um but which I love because you know I do so much cooking and there are a lot of pots and pans and a lot of plates that need washing up um and it is the greatest luxury in the world I got to say having two dishwashers is absolutely life-changing um so I love that and then we have this other little wooden table that's also on Wheels um so you can kind of move it around again just trying to keep the space as flexible as possible and last but not least my um yellow Sunshine fridge which I absolutely adore just cuz it's such a happy color I mean what's not to love cheese lots and lots of cheese um milk cream um I love I'm quite lazy so I love some like chopped onion in the freezer that we probably like always have maybe a bottle of prco or something like that and we've been away for like a week so my fridge is going to be kind of quite mortifying some veggies in there um usually there are some like condiments languishing in a in a far Corner that have maybe been there a bit too long um but yeah butter lots of butter so I'd say the decor of our home feels very it's very colorful I love color I always dress quite colorfully um I don't own many black dresses I'm always wearing lots of color um I love vintage things or antique things so I'd say our home has a lot of character it's full of kind of quirky bits and pieces that maybe I found in a flea market or on eBay or here and there so it's sort of um maybe quite eclectic um lots of um it's quite chintzy so I love a floral hence my floral dress um so there's quite a lot of like um floral prints um and Stripes as well I love Stripes um so it's a mix I'd say of florals and Stripes um and the colors are all quite sort of like pastel colored um other than this room which is sort of this is like I think kind of like I like to think of like the house as like I ice cream colors so this is the raspberry sbet room um but our kitchen is more of like like a soft kind of I'd say um custard custard ice cream it's yellow or like a like a nice lemon sbet um and then we've got like pink finishes like soft pink finishes that are more like a like a sort of strawberry ice cream or strawberry milkshake um so I love kind of soft colors as well as poppy colors um and and just light and kind of I mean it's definitely a very imperfect home it's always really messy it's full of clutter I love clutter I love having all the things that I love around me um so it's a busy it's busy as well so now come with me we're going to go upstairs to the living room living room study part of the house so this is our living room welcome um this is the couch um it's super comfy super super squishy I've actually slept on this couch and it's unbelievably comfortable um we kind of fallen asleep watching a movie and then um spent the night here but and we had it upholstered in this uh chint that I'm completely obsessed with it's a jean Monro design and I just love it I love this intense blue and I love the big pink roses and then we ended up actually having curtains to match in the study so they kind of it sort of draws the two rooms together a little bit but I could literally like live in a house that was covered in this chint I love it so much but my other favorite thing in this room possibly is our well we use this as a bar it's actually a 1950s fornetti fridge that we had um restored so that it works and we kind of use it as a bars we keep kind of all the prco and um drinks that need to be cold there and then have our sort of um lures and so forth on top but I kind of love you know I love all for netti things but especially the old stuff I think is kind of really the best so I was very excited to find this this fireplace we put in um because all the Chim you know the fireplac have been taken out of the house so we s of had them put back in and this actual um this marble fireplace we bought in in an antiqu shop in um Brussels and then had fitted um and I and I and I do love it and it's nice and deep so you can kind of put I haven't got anything on here today but quite often I'll put you know vases of flowers or books or whatever you can kind of decorate it quite nicely which I really like and then coming round um I other things that I love in this room this is a picture of my grandmother um I think it's the only picture I have of her actually um in black and white I think she looks very glamorous so I I love I love this photo of her and then here I have my little trinkets my scented candles my matches Little vase of flowers this is a Modano glass vase um for for that we do for a Tavel and it's the first design of vs that we did for Tavern in this lovely sugar pink was the first color now we make it in um lots of other colorways and blue and like a sort of soft gold and you know clear with different things and but I I think because it's the first one we did it's very very special to me so I always have that there I feel like I always have quite Jazzy lamp shades um I I I do like a colorful uh lamp shade this one's quite faded now and it's uh fabric whereas most of our other lamp shades through the house I think are a paper but I it it's just quite a beautiful ecap print that I kind of really liked and I think cuz the base is is quite simple um it's nice to have a little po pop of color up top um and I mean I love our stripey curtains as well so this is just the sort of red um ticking um like a red stripe like much thinner than the sort of pink stripes downstairs and then here oh I love this I've got my sort of bits and Bobs like random collection of vintage cookbooks the book of The Onion I mean is not not a Fab cover if nothing else 150 ways of cooking it um The Onion um there's this guy called Ambrose Heath who was a very prolific cookery offer in the in 1950s UK and I buy a lot of his books on AE books um here he is again vegetable dishes and salads partly because they actually are full of like really fun um and quite like unusual recipes it by today's standards but also because whoever was designing his book covers was supremely tallented and they're all these like really fun colorful um quite like iconographic um covers which I love um and then this I absolutely love this is a portrait of our two boys in and Aila that my mother gave me and she had um I taken a photo of them in the bath and she had she had this portrait um painted in oil um so I I love that that's very precious for me so when I was about five or six I think I was 6 years old my parents moved to Venice and the idea was my my mother had lived in Rome in her early 20s and loved it and Fall Fallen completely in love with Italy and loved everything Italian and so my parents really thought that you know it would be fun to live in Venice for a year you know almost kind of taking a year out I was going to go to school in Venice learned to speak Italian um and then we'd come back to England but Venice is a very uh special and in many ways quite seductive cities so we kind of just fell in love and then never really left um and then when I so I went to you know I really grew up there and it is for me home I'd say of all the places in the world it's the one that most feels like home um and so I grew up there I went to school there and then when I turned 18 and I graduated from high school or Le High School equivalent um I came to university in England uh which is where I met my husband band and then after University my husband started work in London but I actually continued my studies um for a few years um doing postgraduate uh work and then I became a cookery writer so I've sort of always had this great luxury that I as long as I have a kitchen and a laptop I can kind of work from anywhere so I kind of we fell into this habit of um spending I spent about half the year in Venice um so I'm kind of backwards and forwards between London and vanis so this is my study um this is where I work often if I'm on Zoom calls or if I'm writing sometimes even if I'm kind of focusing on Design Elements and I really want peace and um and somewhere to concentrate and somewhere with a door that I can shut and kind of be alone this is where I come I love this room we um painted it this really like raspberry saw B um red which I kind of really love cuz it's quite a sort of dark room naturally so it sort of felt nice to kind of embrace that with the color and it does feel very very cozy um so here I've got like some fun things that I've had framed so that is my mother had a food shop in London in the 1980s so that's a picture of her in her shop and at one point my father obiously worked as an anti dealers he had another also shop in I think 70s or 80s that's a photo of him in his shop so I quite I quite like that and then these are just um menus from dinners that I've hosted in the in the past that were special to me in some way um that I just framed the menus and I I like to keep them I keep all my menus um and then this is kind of War tow books on this side are all my cook books which controversially organized by color which is um largely because I just find it's quite like I might not always remember the title of the book but I pretty much always remember what the cover looks like so I find this for me it's the easiest way to find my books but I've got i' you know I've got lots more actually but this this is my S core collection um and I love them they're my my pride and joy and they've given me so many hours of fun so this is my third cookbook now um and this one is this is a really fun book to write because it is a cookbook and it is you know over 100 recipes or however many it is I can't remember exactly how many we did I did in the end but um it's basically a book about love and the premise of a book is whenever you cook for someone it's an expression of Love even if you're kind of making someone a cup of tea or slicing them some toast and buttering it it's always an expression of love so the book explores different kind of love and then um to go with each chapter which is about a different kind of love a recipes uh so there are recipes for two for like romantic date nights there's recipes for one there's a lot of there a big chapter on selflove there are recipes that you can cook for your family kind of there's chapter on unconditional love um there's a big chapter on friendship and like big section on comfort food it was really really fun to write um because it's quite esstive emotional book um as well as being a cookbook you know I'm a very greedy person so I mean I love I love cooking and testing recipes and you know um but it was really fun so this wall I kind of end up we were going to put pictures up but actually I use it as a mood board and it's ever evolving and Ever Changing so I put little things up here that I just love um you know like little drawings um if I go to you know like if there's sort of an invitation that someone sends me that I think it's particularly beautiful or I really like the color or The Motif um but in some way I think might be inspiration for for a design or something that I want to work on like you know for a long time we've been working on these little cards for Tava um which are beautiful um Illustrated cards by Isabel Wilkinson and each one is kind of say this is like a little table setting this is is a a tea moment um but each kind one comes with kind of a recipe or some tips and it comes of things so kind of when we were working on that I had a lot of components up here um so I always quite like this corner it's always quite inspiring so I I mean I definitely take a lot of inspiration from Venice I find I do my best work in a way when I'm there definitely in terms of writing or kind of bigger picture work like kind of thinking about new design elements or whatever it is um I mean it's such a beautiful city it's impossible not to feel inspired in Venice it's very peaceful it's every everything's on the water there are no Cars the buildings are very old and ornate and kind of beautifully made so a lot of those elements that have um so naturally just kind of feed into what I do and to I guess help to form an aesthetic that's sort of colorful and a little bit over the top but not too perfect cuz I always think the buildings in Venice are kind of beautiful and opulent and stunning and so much but then they're also kind of slightly crumbling or you know there's always an element that feels a little bit kind of worn in which I think is the coziness you always need the coziness um at a table or in a room or or in a space um so I think that's a lot of the inspiration and I guess in terms of how I cook it's the food that I grew up eating um that I sort of strongly associate with comfort food with happy memories so it's sort of a lot of my recipe inspiration comes from there as well I mean I think the soul of any home comes from the kitchen um for us it's definitely the busiest room in the house in that it's the room that we spend most time in and probably where our happiest times especially as a family um are are um it's you know where friends come over to be with us I love pottering around and and cooking um and it's it's a really colorful it's colorful room so we went for kind of a really like a sort of buttercream custard yellow um kind of inspired by M's kitchen and Chen um and it's a really happy color it kind of feels like sunshine even on the grayest day cuz London has a propensity today is quite a sunny day but um more often than not it's it's quite gray and overcast so even on the grayest day it sort of feels like there's there are rays of sunshine in in that kitchen this is our bedroom um I love this room it's at the back of the house because the house is on quite a busy road looking onto the park on quite a busy road so it's nice cuz it's sort of quieter quieter part of the house I mean the thing that I love most about this room is the walls um and this looks like wallpaper but but it's actually fabric um which is feels so nice and is so nice for a bedroom because it kind of has that sort of like again sort of very cozy very tactile element to it um it's another opportunity for chint um so more chance um but this was a roll of fabric um that um was sort of discontinued and so we just did it for the for the walls of the room and absolutely love it um and then you know it's quite a small room so it's really just room for this bed uh which is four poster and then we had actually we we couldn't quite find um a sort of secondhand or antique vintage for iron frame for poster bed that quite worked for us so we bought a regular bed and then um Ben uh Ben Pantry's design team found someone who could just add the posters on who could add you know make it for poster for us so um that is a kind of lovely detail that makes me very happy and then what else do I have this is nice little corner where sometimes I sit this is a cushion it's looking a little bit well-loved um but it's a a cushion that I tapestried during actually during um the first lockdown during coid it's like a a pie again it's my favorite color pink and yellow together um but I love doing needle point I find it very soothing and relaxing and very rewarding so that's one of the cushions I made here are other ones that I've been making but I need to have need to finish off and have turned into cushions but then it's really nice to have them around the house and you have the memories of the time that you made it does he love florals I don't think he loves them as much as I do um but he he does he I think he he's he he he likes the sofa and he likes um the the walls in this room I think he he doesn't mind a floral but I wouldn't say he's as into them as I am and then I love it I mean I love this bird spread this is more florals this I think is actually PR but it feels quite vintagey and again it's yellow and pink my favorite colors um I quite like that it's reversible so you can kind of use it both ways around and so change up the room a little bit by um turning it over um and it feels really smooshy and cozy um and then oh I also love this um this shinui um Bureau I kind of always wanted a bureau and I kind of use it to store Trinkets and and everything but it's just you know if I'm writing notes or I want a space to work in the bedroom can kind of use it as a desk as well this we actually found from an antique stealer um called now His Name Escapes me but an antique Steeler in the cwoods um and I saw it and I just had to have it um I'd always wanted one like this um so I completely fell head over heels for it so from the bedroom come with me through to our bathroom so this is our bathroom also kind of doubles as a dress dring room so you got kind of all the clove storage over there on that side of the room and then I mean I've got to say the thing I love most about this room is the bath um this was originally two small rooms so this floor well this floor actually was kind of two bedrooms and two small bathrooms and we s of knocked it through to make small bedroom and then a a generous bathroom come come dressing room um and the thing I was completely obsessed with the thing I wanted more than anything was a copper buff um which is here and I must say I love it I mean I'm definitely a bath person rather than a shower person and it is the coziest thing in the world to have a copper buff because um because it conducts heat it the whole thing kind of warms up gently so kind of when you lie back against against the against the bath you don't kind of it doesn't feel cold it feels nice and toasty and warm and I think there's a lovely glow from the color of the copper as well so just you feel very very cook coed um but I love my bath and then this is a another um fireplace that we bought in in again from a different Antiques Market actually in Brussels and then we put in this was sort of inspiration we took inspiration from one of the fireplaces at our flat and Venice that has um tiles as well as the actual fireplace so we had these lovely sort of Del style tiles um put in which I like and make makes it feel very different from the fireplace down in in the living room so these are quite cute these are um little houses little blue and white houses dutch houses and they're um from KLM the Dutch Airline if you I mean I bought them from a flea market but apparently if you fly business class they give you one of these little houses and there are all sorts of different designs and shapes that you need to collect um filled with with with alcohol um and so it's like a a tiny little collection anyway I just thought theyd kind of go I bought these like I said second hand but um it's a small collection that I want to build on cuz I think it goes quite nicely with the Del tiles sorry these These are meant to go on the wall these These are going to go on the wall and um my mother actually gave them to us for Christmas they're painted by someone called um uh well her line is Josephine desine and she she does custom plates so this is me with my my cookbooks that very sweetly my mother had made and then this is the sort of matching one to go with it but they're too beautiful to eat from so I want to have them um mounted on on the wall somewhere but I haven't got around to it yet and then this is a portrait of my grandmother um looking very glamorous so so it's nice to have her in here and then um in terms of I mean this is a freestanding mirror that we bought in again an Antiques Market in Brussels but I absolutely love and actually you can see if I close it you can see the doors of the mirror which I don't actually get to see so often have this sort of beautiful um pattern to them so even they are quite special um this is my Bano bag bag which my um a friend uh Charlotte Olympia designed and I'm completely obsessed with as possibly the thing I love most it's a handbag but it looks like a banjo um and then I've got other little favorite bits and Bobs hanging here that I use um and then this is a little um table that we also got in Brussels and it's just kind of useful storage for like bath salts and bath oils and scented candle and nice bits and Bobs and then these are our wardrobes here's my Sho cupboard I love them I mean I'd say so I've got maybe two top favorites I love these because they're Tutti Frutti so there's like the banana the watermelon and the um pineapple and the strawberry I absolutely love these and then I also love these which are I mean both pairs of these shoes are I'd say not everyday shoes um these with the lips the hot lips and they're both Charlotte Olympia um old ones but still very very beloved and I kind of love we put us a 12 de behind so you have that 12 element home means I guess somewhere cozy and somewhere that I can share somewhere that I can bring the people that I love into so it's I mean typically as long as I've got kind of a table and a way to kind of make toast and tea or something um I'm happy but it it's somewhere where I can be with the people that I love and spend lots of time with them thanks for watching for more home worthy content be sure to like And subscribe

Channel: Homeworthy

Views: 214,474

Keywords: home, home tour, house, house tour, homeworthy, architectural digest, veranda, quintessence, interior design, interior designer, home decor, london, england, chintz, florals, english home, cottagecore, chef, baker, author, english, Skye McAlpine

Id: x2p6DtCbGeI

Length: 47min 50sec (2870 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023