Cath Kidston's west London house has a clever approach to colour and print
‘This part of London is my beat,’ says designer Cath Kidston of this area of Notting Hill, with its stucco villas, ice-cream-coloured terraces and market on Portobello Road selling antiques, clothes and bric-a-brac. Her house, bought in 2019 after the sale of her home in Chiswick, is a short walk from where she opened her first shop in 1993. Cath, then in her mid-thirties, had recently left Nicky Haslam’s studio and set up her own interior design practice, run from the basement of what she describes as a ‘glorified junk shop’ initially stocked with furniture picked up at house-clearance sales. She was blazing a trail for the use of in-between pieces – not serious antiques, but affordable well-made things that had a past life – and mixing them with heirlooms and high-street buys.
‘It felt like quite an unusual way to do things back then,’ she says. ‘We were moving away from the pastiche of country-house formality that had been such a big thing in the 1980s. I was trying to make vintage glamorous. Then I found these beautiful, floral Eastern European fabrics that I thought I’d sell to the trade, but the factory sent them made up as duvet covers and pillowcases – a very happy accident. I never planned to be a product designer but, after that, the products gradually overtook the decorating.’
The Cath Kidston brand then became a multi-million-pound phenomenon, launching a tidal wave of flower-print objects into homes all over the world and becoming inextricably linked with one of the biggest decorative trends from the early 1990s that continued for decades: ‘vintage chic’. It is not a term used by Cath, who remembers feeling surprised the first time that a journalist referred to something being ‘very Cath Kidston’.
After selling her majority stake in the company in 2015, she began to spend more time at her house in Gloucestershire. In 2017, she set up a studio called Joy of Print, producing a small collection of pretty, sophisticated fabrics and wallpapers. More recently, she launched C.Atherley, a bath and body range inspired by the scented geraniums she was cultivating in her greenhouse. Cath and her husband Hugh (a record producer who has worked with Sting and Phil Collins) had not had a base in London for a few years when they bought this house but, with her two new businesses flourishing, Cath was ready to go back to her roots.
The house is in a tall, late-Georgian terrace that backs onto a large private garden square with views of a forest of old London plane trees filled with flocks of parakeets. Building work began a couple of months before the first lockdown, with much of the house being designed remotely. The lower-ground floor was extended, with Crittall doors opening onto the garden. Having initially planned the kitchen to be in this area, Cath changed her mind. ‘We realised we’d spend our life down there and end up with a dead space on the ground floor that we wouldn’t use,’ she explains. The kitchen is now the first room you enter as you come in the front door, with a sitting room-cum-library downstairs, including a large table where the couple entertain and play cards.
With presence of mind, Hugh had taken pictures of each piece of furniture from their old house. Locked down in Gloucestershire, Cath built the schemes for the London house on Pinterest. Her approach to decorating, unsurprisingly, centres around colour, with rooms organised into a connected palette anchored by the neutral kitchen and stairway, and slowly built up in layers through textiles and art. The result is spaces that hum with soft, happy energy. Perhaps this was part of the secret of her success as a designer: her deftness with colour and pattern, and her ability to harness it to create a joyful mood. For this is undoubtedly a happy house. In the sitting room and main bedroom, Cath says she ‘had a craving to use lilac, lime green and red’. It is not a palette for the faint-hearted, but she has managed to pull it off.
The kitchen was inspired by her collection of red and blue ironstone china. The wooden units are subtle and contemporary, with all the working parts and appliances tucked out of view. Two armchairs have been stripped down to their calico and covered with antique ticking from Katharine Pole; the rug from Robert Stephenson ‘has a little bit of lilac borrowed from the ticking’. And spread on the old French dining table, used by Cath as a desk, is an antique African Ewe cloth that echoes the colours of the antique Delft tiles on the chimneypiece. Everywhere there is a balance between rigour and whimsy, done and undone, old and new.
Having been a collector since she was 18, Cath uses art as the linchpin of many of the rooms. The hallways are crammed with paintings, a Mary Fedden or a Grayson Perry rubbing shoulders with things she has picked up from markets and junk shops. An Ellsworth Kelly print found at auction was the big buy for the kitchen. Downstairs, in the sitting room, there is a large floral piece by Jasper Conran’s husband, the artist Oisín Byrne. Up in the bedroom is a series by Spanish artist Ramiro Fernández Saus depicting Adam and Eve’s fall from the garden of Eden.
‘For me, buying pictures is like investing in stocks and shares. Emotional stocks and shares, rather than financial ones,’ says Cath. ‘I wanted the house to have timeless bones. Then I can change the cushions and pictures as the years go by, and the house can evolve. I wanted it to feel elegant but unexpected’.
Joy of Print: joyofprint.co.uk | C.Atherley: c-atherley.com