It’s said that many of life’s best ideas are conceived around the kitchen table, and in the case of interior decorator Cindy Leveson, that’s certainly true. More than 30 years ago, she had a light-bulb moment that would alter both her professional and personal life.
She and her husband, John, a landscape designer, were rapidly outgrowing their compact two-bedroom flat in Battersea. After months of searching, they had resigned themselves to the fact that their budget would not stretch to a house in the area.
Their elderly neighbour in the flat next door had recently passed away. From the kitchen window at the back of their home, Cindy could see straight into the empty rooms. One evening, over dinner, the solution suddenly presented itself.
“I think I have the answer. What if we bought her flat and extended laterally?” she said to John. “We don’t even need to move.”
Luck was on their side and the sale was secured. The untouched flat next door contained a post-war hip bath in the kitchen and only two electrical sockets in total. Many would have been daunted. Cindy took it in her stride.
Over the ensuing years, the two flats were combined piecemeal, as and when budget allowed. However incomplete the renovation, the space always felt like home. Artworks, ceramics, glassware and fabrics layered together to create warmth long before the building work was finished.
That instinctive ease is rooted in Cindy’s distinctly British decorating sensibility, honed over a 40-year career spanning fashion PR, still-life styling and, most notably, the private and public interiors of Goodwood Estate for its custodian, her lifelong friend Charles Gordon-Lennox, now Duke of Richmond and Gordon. She works to a simple principle: hang the pictures and make the beds first. Everything else can follow.
Their apartment remains a masterclass in relaxed country-style living in the city. It is both home and busy design studio, and a reminder that sometimes the answer to a space problem is right next door.
The original 1900 maisonette
Back in 1985, Cindy bought the flat as a second-floor, purpose-built maisonette dating from 1900. The previous owners had already extended into the attic space, creating a drawing room leading on to a roof terrace. “It had a small kitchen, also with a terrace, a bedroom, a bathroom and a spare room,” says Cindy, who at that time was working in styling and gradually making the move into interior decoration. “The layout worked fine, but of course I wanted to make my mark, decoratively speaking. However, my budget was tight and I had a lodger to help pay the bills. I couldn’t afford to rip anything out, so instead I got creative.”
Cindy added a fireplace in the attic drawing room to create a focal point and invited her friends round one weekend to paint the walls. “We were aiming for a stippled effect. Looking back, the result was more like pesto,” she laughs, “but we lived with it for years.” Gathered curtains in an Osborne & Little chintz and a generous pelmet completed the look.
The kitchen was simply repainted, and the bedroom was treated to a homemade corona complete with a swagged voile bow over the bed. “I remember feeling very pleased with it,” says Cindy of those more-is-more 1980s interiors. “I didn’t have a definitive plan; I just wanted the flat to feel cosy – the kind of place that seemed effortless rather than pretentious.”
That sensibility is perhaps due in part to her antique-collecting parents, in particular her mother, “who couldn’t pass an antiques store, whether high-end or bric-a-brac, without stopping for a rummage, us children in tow”. In fact, when Cindy was 11, her mother remarried and bought a small cottage in rural Sussex. “There was no electricity for the first 10 years,” she recalls, “just oil lamps. But we loved it.” That may explain Cindy’s own penchant for beautiful but imperfect schemes.
In 1988, John moved in, and the couple married shortly after. They used the spare bedroom as their office, with two telephones, one for incoming calls and one for outgoing. However, within a few years, having amassed a large number of artworks, including portraits from John’s naval family, they knew it was time to expand their horizons. Enter flat number two.
Knocking through and doubling the space
Having bought the next-door flat in 1994, Cindy and John found it easy to knock through, since conjoining two properties at the same height required a licence rather than planning permission. An opening was created in the main bedroom alcove. “We then turned that room – our original bedroom – into a dining room with a cleverly camouflaged jib door that conjoined the two flats,” Cindy explains.
“In the new flat, we knocked through two rooms, front and back, to create a large, dual-aspect bedroom with a small en suite.” The couple’s original office in the spare room was moved to what had been the kitchen in the new flat, which freed up space for a second sitting room that they use as a TV room, complete with the addition of a fireplace and red toile wallpaper.
The country house look remained in full swing, partly due to Cindy’s brilliantly honed magpie eye. Everywhere, there is something to look at, from portraits of the couple’s black Labradors to Georgian glassware. “My father always taught me to include a touch of black and a bit of tat, otherwise a home doesn’t look real,” says Cindy. At that point, the couple also upgraded their existing kitchen, opting for smart navy and white, including large-scale gingham check curtains. There was, however, one snag. “By this time, I had a small team working for me,” says Cindy, “but from the new office next door, there was no way of getting to the kitchen other than walking through our bedroom. So, in 2004, we decided to build into the attic of the second flat, using a mirror-image template of the first. That would become the new office/studio, with double doors carved out of the party wall to conjoin it to the drawing room next door, thus solving the problem.”
How the interiors continue to evolve
With the jigsaw complete some 20 years after she first bought the flat, Cindy was free to tweak and refine. “People often ask me, given my profession, if I switch things up all the time, but in fact, I don’t,” she says. “I prefer to gently layer. I am a compulsive buyer, but I tend to integrate things, rather than swap pieces out. At art school, I was taught that presentation was 50 per cent of a job well done. I’ve always subscribed to that theory.”
That may explain why her connection to Goodwood still thrives. “Charles and I met when we were 18 and 16 respectively and we’ve simply always been like-minded in our tastes,” she says of their decades-long collaboration, which has helped spawn a highly creative career, most recently culminating in the CL Collection, Cindy’s range of rugs, wallpapers, tableware, tiles, lampshades and artworks.
But despite its treasured collections, there’s nothing museum-like about this home. Most recently, Cindy has once again revisited the kitchen, swapping the gingham curtains for crisply painted window frames in a bold mid-blue, Little Greene’s Woad, which has also been used on the cabinetry, and is complemented by striped vertical tiles from Your Tiles. A whimsical floral wallpaper by Antoinette Poisson is virtually indestructible thanks to three layers of decorator’s varnish.
The hallway’s former oxblood walls have been repainted in Farrow & Ball’s Pigeon and Blue Gray, the better to show off the couple’s burgeoning collection of oils, watercolours and illustrations. The dining room has pale blush-pink walls inspired by the colour of washed-out terracotta pots, and the spare room has been painted in Farrow & Ball’s Calke Green for a grounding backdrop to its soft pink florals.
“The best compliment I can receive after I’ve decorated a space is that it doesn’t feel spanking new,” Cindy reflects. “I like people to walk into a room and instantly feel good without knowing why.”
Forty years on, this home feels both timeless, yet softly of-the-moment. “We’re lucky in that we have great east-west light in every room, and we’re at the top of the building, which gives us uninterrupted views,” says Cindy. “For as long as we can make it up the stairs, this will always be our home. We found what we were looking for, right under our noses.”
For more information on Cindy Leveson’s interior design projects, visit levesondesign.com
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