I used to have nightmares about the colours. Before we’d actually moved in, I would wake at dawn in a hot sweat thinking about just how fat and sun-yellow the sofa was, just how open-artery red the study, just how rudely pink the bedroom. Too bold, I kept on thinking, it’s going to be way too bold. It was like every colour clash in my head came dancing dervishly out of the shadows. There’s that old expression, ‘blue and green should not be seen without a colour in between’. And I had it everywhere. A green marble topped kitchen, with chevron tiles the colour of Caribbean seas offset against it and lined up high frequency against the walls. And in my bedroom, itself a shiny turquoise thing, alongside the bed an equally turquoise bath, with an interior as green as sage so that it’s like lying in sea-kelp depths. From my bath – water as hot as Hades – I make calls and look at Adam (the name I have given the linden tree outside my window) and watch his seasonal shift and leaf-shimmy. I have put an old Art Deco drinks trolley by the taps (it arrived from Ebay smashed to pieces, my husband glued it back together again, though there’s no doubt she still has an essential tremor familiar to beings of her age) and here’s where I keep all my essential liquids – Floris bath oils, vodka and tonics.
I like looking out at nature of course, but I like nature making its way into the house too. There are creatures everywhere; beautiful pink cranes in my bathroom, a parrot on my bedhead, a skeleton of a bat I found at Josephine Ryan in Tetbury, which looks exactly like a human wearing wings (you can see where the Dracula notion came from), a wooden fish from Niger which has an articulated jaw on a piece of string, some fossilised mushrooms I found on 1stdibs, which also arrived smashed. It’s a theme. I don’t mind smashed things, broken things, things that other people have thrown away. I’ve found a peculiar amount of chairs on the side of the road; the ones around our kitchen table for example were thrown on a heap in an office basement, but they turned out not to be rubbish, as I thought they were, which was a little awkward.
My friend Tom Bartlett at Waldo Works was my architect supreme. We have known each other since we were teenagers pretending to be cooler than the parties we were hanging out at on the Kings Road in the 90s. Tom’s style is naturally more restrained, more elegant, more concise, but he is brilliant at channelling a vibe and his sense of space and of how to make connections is exhilarating. In the sitting room, I had always wanted the walls to be painted like a tropical palm forest I had seen at the Lyford Cay Club in the Bahamas. Tom was worried we didn’t have the wraparound of walls needed for it to feel like a conceit. But I was adamant, and in the end he made the tiniest little wooden model of it which he then enamelled in micro detail. It was so lovely to look at – and it also made us realise it was possible. So then the brilliant painter, Mark Cullup turned up and lived outside in his van for a few weeks, painting away. Sometimes his girlfriend would come over and help, sometimes his daughter; in the evenings we’d go and have supper in the pub. It was wonderful to literally see the trees grow.
We kept a lot of things from the previous owner, Lucy; curtains for example, that we would give a new spritz to by sewing on a yellow border. And Lucy was a gardener, so her legacy there has been infinite. We have raspberries and rhubarb, a mulberry tree the magpies go mad over, a bush I’d never come across before called Profusion, which offers out sticks full of hard skittle-purple berries which I give to everyone over the winter months as they are so joyful. There was one amazing Jurassic beast that audaciously spread its wings across the paving in gargantuan fashion. I loved it very much. But my husband found out it was a weed and dug it up and threw it away. I found it hard to talk to him for a couple of days and still can’t look at the spot where she used to be. Another friend, the amazing Chris Hodge from Shackadelic built a hut for us in the garden. It is a cool woodland sprite of a box with external walls made of stumps. One of my teenage daughter’s lives in there, it has its own shower so she doesn’t have to battle it out with her two sisters. This makes her happy.
I like tapping into home-grown artists and makers. I’m about to launch Loupe, a UK-focused travel and lifestyle website; the juiciness of talent we have here in prodigious. By definition it is of course more sustainable, not shipping in stuff from all corners of the world. I have acid trippy marbleised lampshades from Rosi de Ruig, a mass of graphically uplifting materials from the lovely Ottoline Devries, several quirky intriguing collages from an artist called Matthew Richardson, a beautiful fat droplet pendant light from the amazing talented ladies at Ochre. In my tropical tree sitting room, my own version of the garden of Eden, the carpet is from Christopher Farr, it depicts a snake eating a pomegranate. Good and evil, I’m deeply suspicious of the polemic associated with most tales; how you understand it will always depend on who’s telling the story. And nothing makes me happier than telling stories, on paper, or in bricks.
Melinda Stevens is the founder of Salt Lick
Tom Griffiths1/23The tropical Eden sitting room with a whale bone found on a beach on Jura on the right, some fossilised fungi up on the brackets on the walls. A few pieces in here – the black and white lamp-stands and the brass table the record player is on – I picked up at The Old Cinema second-hand furniture store in Chiswick.
Tom Griffiths2/23I meant for this to be a party room, hence the little portraits of mushrooms hiding in corners, the psychedelic cover of the ottoman by Josef Frank, the 70s bubblecious light from Tom Dixon – but actually it’s where we read and fall asleep on the sofas made by our buddy Nick Plant.
Tom Griffiths3/23The Red Room, which is really a mixture of a library and a TV room. I found the artworks from Greek artist Eloise Fornieles on Instagram and my husband just hung them, but they’re too heavy and now we can’t open the hatch to get to the screen. The pendant light is from Collier Webb; it was the one from the window so they let me have a discount.
Tom Griffiths4/23The room is full of books, but also my collection of weird lights. I’ve got magnetic moons and a bulb that spins that I found in Munich airport, and also a croissant that pings on and off according to its mood.
Tom Griffiths5/23My dad owned Queen magazine in the late 50s and early 60s. I have all his leatherbound copies and they’re amazing. In one issue he ran at least 35 pages of photos by Henri Cartier Bresson.
Tom Griffiths6/23Books are like scrapbook memories to me of the places where I’ve read them, or the galleries I’ve visited of artists’ work. Every year we go to a tiny island in Greece and big fat prayer beads and evil eyes painted onto stones are everywhere throughout the house.
Tom Griffiths7/23The skeleton of the bat I fell in love with in Tetbury. Look at his ribcage, his legs, his feet, his toes… he’s so human, with these most wonderful long fingers like draped pylons.
Tom Griffiths8/23A set of David Hockney weather prints that were my Dad’s are lined up the stairs.
Tom Griffiths9/23The hallway had a drum kit in for a few years, because two of my daughters supposedly play. Supposedly. The picture of the allium I bought decades ago for £15, as it was exactly the tall thin shape I needed to fit a spot in an old house.
Tom Griffiths10/23I’ve known Martha Freud since she was a teenager and I am the biggest fan of her brilliant, uplifting work. This is a light installation I asked her to secretly make for my husband’s 50th birthday; it contains lyrics that my daughters and I put together for him which include a mix of all sorts including AC/DC, Faithless and Eminem.
Tom Griffiths11/23I found all these chairs on from the side of the road. The orange ones I picked up on a pavement in Shepherd’s Bush; I think they were for sale for £50 the two of them. The blue ones were discarded in an office basement.
Tom Griffiths12/23I’ve collected pictures from everywhere over the years, from flea markets in Chianti to the dusty furniture shop next to my doctor’s office in Earl’s Court. All along this shelf I keep the jam jars full of shells the children – but mostly I – have scavenged from the seas shores of our travels.
Tom Griffiths13/23A painting of a wild dog by our friends Olly + Suzi above a fireplace by Tom at Waldo Works. He thinks fire surrounds are naff, but I forced him to design something and he came up with this lemon sherbet chevron number. The tiny fireside chairs are from Arlo & Jacob: they’re normal-sized chairs I just choose not to screw the legs on. I’m not very good at blinds on lower basement levels as they block out so much of the scene, so I asked Mark Cullup to paint this kind of data line around the perimeters of the window frames instead.
Tom Griffiths14/23We have friends and family pieces everywhere. On the right-hand side are paintings given to me by my cousin the artist Carey Burrows for our wedding present. On the left, wonderful photographs by the gorgeous Tommy Clarke.
Tom Griffiths15/23My passion for turquoise came out of the glasses my mother used to collect which I have on this shelf. They inspired the similar coloured heartbeat monitor line of the tiles from Popham and the seats with the turquoise velvet bottoms found on Ebay.
Tom Griffiths16/23Our turquoise panelled bedroom was meticulously designed by Tom. The drawings that line it are by Edward Le Bas, my husband’s great uncle, who was part of the Bloomsbury crew. They are his costume designs for a production of The Duchess of Malfi, given to me by my mother-in-law.
Tom Griffiths17/23I am obsessed by baths, and spend hours in them. The bathroom in the house previously was very small and cramped, so I happily welcomed bringing it right into the room, in front of the fireplace and with an Art Deco drinks cabinet filled with potions.
Tom Griffiths18/23The wallpaper is by fabulous Gucci, the books are by fabulous writers.
Tom Griffiths19/23Old prints from my dad’s printing class when he was Rector of the Royal College of Art. I found them in a dusty box in storage and had them framed. The light brackets are actually hung upside down, but we decided to keep them that way.
Tom Griffiths20/23Blue and white are the colours of holidays to me. And in a rather Freudian slip, the two colours ended up everywhere, in far more places than I intended. The wood wallpaper was a bid to try and earth it.
Tom Griffiths21/23Melinda Stevens.
Tom Griffiths22/23The hut built by Shackadelic. The wood of it smells so lovely and the foxes from the park like to sunbathe on the roof.
Tom Griffiths23/23The wooden tabletop was a present from my best friend from a felled tree in Shropshire. It’s far too high, so we all look like elves sitting at it, but it makes us happy.
