My Modern House: garden designer Phoebe D'Arcy on city versus country life at her renovated family home in north London
Phoebe: “When we arrived here it was stacked full of halogen lights, and there was a lime green and purple colour scheme – very different to what we like!
“Coming from our last place, a one-bedroom flat in Stoke Newington, it was the most massive house we could imagine, though. We found we had almost nothing to fill the house with, except a brand-new baby that screamed all the time and we had no idea how to look after.
“We only occupied a few rooms at the beginning. Eight years later we have three children and it doesn’t feel quite so massive.
“Our kids are ages seven, five and seven months, so it’s very much a family house. We had to make the space work a bit harder for us than it was. But I didn’t want to blast it apart and make it huge, because it didn’t feel right. We wanted to maintain some integrity and the nice bits of the Victorian house, like the fireplaces, whilst updating it to make it more functional.
“I also didn’t want to change the footprint of the house and lose the side return, which everyone seems to do. I think it would have ruined the living room and I prefer the separation of kitchen and living space – I don’t want to smell onions while I’m watching TV!
“In the kitchen, we dug down and put underfloor heating in, as well as a Crittall door to the garden. Underfloor heating is a revelation for family life – the boys come home in their football kits and just lie on it, and my five-year-old practices breaststroke up and down the kitchen on his tummy! It’s wonderful.
“We’re able to have quite a simple, uncluttered kitchen because of the long stretch of cupboards we built in the hallway. We built the laundry cupboard, for example, because I was tired of my wine glass bouncing across the table when the washing machine was on in the evenings. It just makes everything work much better.
“Now I think we have the best of both worlds. They’re so adaptable, these houses, although there is a lot of wasted space! The biggest spaces in our house are the hallways and stairs, but, nevermind, it contributes to a sense of lightness and openness.
“I’m a landscape gardener and have worked on projects like Alex Bagner’s house near London Fields. I trained in theatre design but, when I finished, I realised I didn’t want to be in the dark all the time in the theatre, and actually I wanted to be in the light. As it turns out, theatre design and garden design have some lovely parallels, because it’s all about backlighting, shapes and silhouettes, layering, and making people look in a certain way or direction.
“The differences are the materials, obviously: nature is ephemeral, and changes constantly, and I like that about gardening. To me, it’s the most exciting kind of design because it’s alive, it looks different all the time, and your audience is actually in the space.
“We have another place in Suffolk, and that’s where most of my gardening happens, and where I experiment. This garden here is about low maintenance: it’s a small London garden and the main priority for us is that it’s easy to look after.
“We have a 1959 bungalow in Walberswick on the Suffolk coast and have fallen in love with modernist architecture. We bought that a few years ago, and we’re so lucky to have been able to do it as we have two very boisterous boys, and it’s a lifeline, really, for them to be able to race across the beach and run around.
“It’s very sixties, and everything is as it was with beautiful black lights and built-in cupboards everywhere – it doesn’t have an avocado bath suite but it might as well have! There’s no dado rail or elaborate fireplaces and it’s just delightful. I would love a 1960s house here in London. This is all very nice and London-y but with a busy family life, I like the simplicity of 1960s design.
“The boys love Suffolk because they have the beach, their bikes and the trees, the woods. In London, we have to get on with the treadmill of family life, and it’s quite logistical. In Suffolk, there’s just a beach, and something happens to the children where, magically, they don’t need any of their stuff, or toys. They can play on the beach for hours with just sticks and stones, which they would never do in London.
“We have no Wi-Fi and no phone there, so no emails all weekend, and that’s very powerful for us and the kids. It’s all quite fashionable, to have a digital detox like that, but it’s certainly changed our life.”
Phoebe, how do you define modern living?
“Free-flowing”
Is there a home on The Modern House website that has caught your eye?“My grandfather was an architect, and I have grown up with an awareness and huge respect for the visionary principles behind modernism: I love the economy of materials used, the simplicity of layout, and lack of surface ornament.
“As such, the scale and proportions of Ornan Road, NW3, appealed to me. One doesn’t really need a vast open plan kitchen to be happy: it’s quite nice to close the door on a messy worktop and leave it to later. I would also enjoy redesigning its garden to make it a rich patchwork of lush greens and sprinkles of white flowers which would lift the house from inside and out.”
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