PEARL LOWE: AFTER 20 YEARS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, WE MOVED TO A PARTY FLAT IN LONDON
“If you’d asked me even last year whether I’d move back to London, I’d have said no,” says Pearl Lowe. “When I left London 20 years ago, I thought that’s it, I’m done with it. But now we’re back, I’ve never been happier.”
The fashion and textile designer is sitting on the pink velvet sofa in the Notting Hill flat that she and her husband, musician Danny Goffey, finished renovating earlier this year, after two decades living near Frome in Somerset. Their country home, which is now on the market, had been the centre of family life since they moved there from north London in 2005 – and, thanks to Pearl’s flair for decorating in a romantic, vintage style, had become a star in itself, appearing in the pages of many a coffee-table book and interiors magazine. But with all of their four children now grown up, and their youngest, Betty, at university, their life in the country had changed.
“We had created our lives there, we both had our studios and I had my local seamstresses, so there was lots on in the daytime; but in the evening, particularly in the week, it was just very, very quiet,” she says. “We felt almost like we were in retirement, and we’re not.”
It was Danny who suggested looking in London. “He said, ‘Why don’t we just get a little flat, see if we like it? You know, maybe it’s time.’ We’ve got a lot of friends here, and my mum’s here, my brothers and their families; it’s my home too.” They originally looked in the East End, but given that their plan is to maintain a base in Somerset – where their daughter Daisy now lives with her family – west London made more sense. When this flat on a quiet street of pretty pastel houses came up, it immediately piqued her interest. “I liked that it had its own entrance, which a lot of ground-floor flats don’t, and the high ceilings and airy feel. I sort of fell in love with it at first sight,” she says. “It had a good energy – as soon as I came in I felt happy, and I think that’s really important.”
To buy the flat, they sold a beach house on the East Sussex coast, which they had used as a holiday home but also as a business, hiring it out as a holiday let – which, Pearl says, was “quite stressful”. “We’d be having dinner down in Somerset and someone would call with some issue with the boiler, and we’d have to drive for four hours to sort it out,” she says.
A blank canvas
They completed on the flat last November, and then spent three months renovating it. When they bought it, the flat was painted white, with a grey kitchen, grey carpets and engineered-wood flooring in the living area – a minimalist look that was the opposite of Pearl’s signature maximalist aesthetic. Her first instinct was to take the flooring up, just to see what was underneath. “Danny wanted to keep it at first, but then one day when he wasn’t there I got the builders to pull some of it up, and there was the original flooring underneath, so that was that really,” she says. She had the floorboards insulated, relaid and sanded, then stained a rich dark brown that complements the period features of the room.
No structural work was needed, but they did replace the kitchen and bathrooms, and redecorated throughout. The ground-floor living area is painted in Setting Plaster by Farrow & Ball – a favourite colour that they had used and loved in their Somerset house – which set the palette for the room. The plaster-pink velvet sofa and deep red velvet armchairs from Soho Home have been paired with an antique Italian table, and a mustard velvet sofa and floor lamp from the vintage shop Muirshin Durkin, off the Portobello Road. The sofa has been dressed with a large shell-shaped cushion from Sera of London; and antique lace curtains, which Pearl has been selling for years via her online shop, hang at the windows. “I love that they bring a softness, and the fact that they let the light in but you can’t see through from the outside,” she says – a key consideration in a picturesque street that attracts tourists.
Bringing the party
The kitchen is at the back of the living area, and Pearl wanted it to feel like “a cool, glamorous bar where we could have parties”, rather than a purely functional space. They used the British kitchen company deVol, which supplied full-height cabinetry that makes the most of the high ceilings, painted in Mizzle by Farrow & Ball, along with a marble-topped butcher’s table, which acts as a compact and elegant alternative to a kitchen island.
More lace panels – at the window, under the counter and behind the glazed doors of the cabinets – add softness. There’s a shelf for displaying pictures and flowers, which helps to make the room look more decorative, and mirrored tiles from Fired Earth make for a glamorous splashback, enhancing the Parisian bistro style of the room and helping to bounce the light around.
Between the living area and kitchen are a dining table picked up at a flea market surrounded by a set of vintage bamboo chairs, opposite which stands an enormous French cabinet known as “the beast”, which is perfect for concealing the less-than-aesthetic necessities of life that Pearl doesn’t want on display, such as a printer and paperwork.
Serene spaces
Upstairs, the starting point for the main bedroom was the French cane bed. Pearl chose Salon Drab, a deep green-brown by Farrow & Ball, and added a tassel trim to the top of the walls just below the ceiling, which acts as a decorative border and brings texture. The curtains, with a flop-over frill and more tassels, are by Tori Murphy.
The second bedroom, which is usually reserved for Betty, has a striped red wallpaper by Mulberry Home and a ceiling painted in Eating Room Red by Farrow & Ball, which creates a boudoir vibe, enhanced by the vintage damask curtains. The bed, from Soho Home, has been accessorised with a vintage frill, and is flanked by early-20th-century mirrored bedside tables and fringed glass wall lights from Rothschild & Bickers.
Pearl is a fan of a pink bathroom, so for the walls here, she chose long slim metro tiles from Bert & May in pink and white, laid in vertical formation to form stripes. The free-standing bath, from BC Designs, almost didn’t make it in: “The builders said they couldn’t get it into the room, but I was adamant; I was having that bath,” she says. The basin unit by deVOL and the antique pendant light above the bath add touches of vintage character.
With the flat now complete, Pearl is able to appreciate the spontaneity of having everything on her doorstep. “I’m not a routine person; I like to live in the moment,” she says. “The other day, I was having dinner with a friend, and other people we knew kept walking by and joining us. In the end there were about 10 of us, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is really fun. You don’t have to plan weeks ahead here.’”
As for what’s next, she admits that she gets itchy feet when it comes to decorating a home. “I do like to have a project,” she says. “It’s my creative outlet. For a while, I did up houses for other people, but that didn’t satisfy me because I didn’t get to live in them.”
She’s open to the possibility of moving again within London, but for now, she is enjoying her new life, back in the buzz of the city. “I have so many friends in Somerset, there’s a real community there, so to leave it feels kind of heart-wrenching,” she says. “But on the other hand, sometimes you’ve just got to move on. I’ve been in the quiet of the countryside for the past 20 years; here, every day feels like Mardi Gras.”
Faded Glamour in the City by Pearl Lowe is out on Oct 14, published by CICO Books (£25); photography by Kate Martin © CICO Books; pre-order at pearllowe.co.uk
2025-10-03T06:01:11Z
