The 30-year evolution of Lucinda Chambers' London house

A house, by its very nature, is an ever-changing place that we rearrange, redecorate and rebuild as our needs evolve; it develops just as its owners do. In the case of Lucinda Chambers, the co- founder of the fashion and lifestyle brand Collagerie, the west London house in which she has lived for 30 years has seen both more changes than many and less than the others on her street. ‘I’m always curious that when people buy houses here, they inevitably gut them, however beautiful they might be,’ says Lucinda. ‘That might be bold, but I feel slightly uneasy about it. People think they have to put their stamp on it – all over it. But, for me, it’s an evolution.’

The process of decorating her house has taken time, patience and flexibility, and yet little has changed structurally. The bones – which were good when she moved into it in the Eighties with her husband Simon and three young children – have barely changed, except for the kitchen. This is not what comes to mind when you hear the words ‘west London kitchen extension’, but rather a charming, country- style room at the back of the house, which has not been repainted since they first did the work 25 years ago.

Bar the glossy red Aga, the kitchen is in fact one of the few neutral rooms in the house, which is painted in a spectrum of colours. These range from bright yellow in the adjoining dining room through Little Greene’s ‘Firefly’ red with a yellow trim in the downstairs sitting room and conker brown, blue-grey and black in the hallway, to a deep red in the upstairs sitting room. ‘Every surface is an opportunity to add colour,’ explains Lucinda. ‘A skirting board, cornicing, the back of a door – they all talk to each other and have a nice conversation. Or sometimes I want them to argue a bit.

Owen Gale

‘I think what I am is a tweaker,’ she continues. ‘I have done every room a few times over the years, but always room by room and never with a vision for the entire house.’ Given her successful career – Lucinda was fashion director at British Vogue for 25 years – it is no surprise that her approach to interiors is much like her approach to clothes, which encompasses her ‘love of texture, love of colour and love of print’. It is a combination that has created a house that feels loved, comfortable and, above all, welcoming. ‘Comfort is underrated,’ she enthuses. ‘If you want to look in any way stylish, you have to feel comfortable and houses are the same. If you can’t throw yourself on a sofa, or slope off and have a nap, it doesn’t work.’

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The sense of comfort comes from her mix and match attitude to decorating, bringing in elements from all over the world as she finds them, without overthinking them. As fashion icon Diana Vreeland famously wrote, ‘The eye has to travel’, and in Lucinda’s house, there are endless things to peer and marvel at. The chairs around the dining table are all different styles and materials, for instance, and there are pieces in the house spanning many decades, bought from markets all over the world. No surface has been left unloved or unadorned. While the rooms might be filled with a lifetime of collected pieces and their stories, there is a rhythm and a flow to it all.