‘Nothing sharp.’ When I listen back to my conversation with interior designer Joanna Plant at her new home-cum-studio in Camden, I hear this phrase a few times. It’s not one I’ve heard before in relation to decoration, but it makes sense. Joanna and her husband, Nick, have only lived here a year or so, but the house already feels settled. Nothing shouts and nothing is sharp. This is a slow house, with places for sitting and mooching, one in which every space is used. Its contents have been whittled down to favourite things.
More than any thing, it feels like it has been as it is for a long time. Joanna and Nick, who sources antiques and upholstery for her studio and others, raised their two sons at their previous home in Acton, west London, but when the children flew the nest, it was time for a rethink. ‘Everyone thought we’d move out,’ she says. ‘All our friends thought we’d go to some sort of rectory in Wiltshire or something, but no, we moved in.’ Was it a wrench? Far from it. She was itching to go. Less time in the car, a less suburban life, and – crucially – something achievable now, while they still had the energy to take on a big project.
They had always wanted a flat above a shop and soon found that you can get one or the other, but rarely both. So when this one came up on a terrace that would have serviced the adjacent square – and just a few doors from Joanna’s friend, the decorator Adam Bray – they leapt at the chance. This was an opportunity to think properly for the first time about how they wanted to live, rather than muddling along. Looking at their home now, a one-bed Victorian terrace over three floors, it’s hard to imagine that it was once a grimy flat above a standard off-licence where Amy Winehouse used to buy her vodka.
Once they had the keys, Nick and Joanna set about dividing the downstairs into three five-metre-square spaces with the studio at the front, from which Joanna designs homes known for their cleaned-up traditionalism with a rock ’n’ roll edge. An office-cum-hallway in the middle painted in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Old White’ gives way to a panelled kitchen, with a tiny loo and a utility room shoehorned in-between. The couple bought the place in 2023; all the floors came up and several fake ceilings came down. They had no kitchen for five months. ‘You romanticise the whole thing,’ Joanna says, with a wince. ‘The walking up and down stairs with a bucket – which I even started to call a pail, like a sort of Victorian fantasy – to wash up in the bath. It was a bit much.’
Although Joanna states that sufficient budget is one of her prerequisites for accepting a project (along with a good client and a house that makes the heart race), there are clever economies everywhere here, particularly in the kitchen. The couple have jettisoned an expensive fitted room for a simple stainless-steel frame with appliances tucked underneath, made by a Birmingham fabricator, Kitchen Solutions, for little over a thousand pounds. You don’t need a huge American-style fridge for two. An old-fashioned kitchen table will always be cheaper than an island, and besides, ‘I like to be able to sit down, and for everyone to sit with me,’ Joanna explains, gesturing to the comfortable armchair in the corner. ‘I find with islands everyone is kind of clinging to it like a raft.’ What looks to the untrained eye like a polished concrete floor is in fact a smart German imitation paint – just shovel it on and it levels out. Renovators, take note.
Throughout the entire process, Joanna found herself begging the builders to ‘Please mind my stairs!’ When they finally left, the treads were filthy, so she scrubbed them to within an inch of their lives. ‘I don’t do very well with stair carpets, I’ve got too many animals,’ Joanna remarks – they currently have a black Staffie called Beetle and a cat called Mouse in residence. ‘Too much fuss and too much hoovering.’ She originally planned to paint them, but changed her mind. In a house where everything from the floorboards to the ceiling heights are new, they’re a reminder of what came before.
Most of the furniture came from their old place and can ‘take a bit of a punch’, says Joanna. ‘There’s nothing terribly valuable and it’s all been around the block a few times. In my work I don’t love things to look overly decorated. I try to make it look like things just happened that way.’ Nonetheless, there’s one very grand, very intentional decorative statement at the heart of the house. The two adjoined sitting rooms on the first floor are papered in Joanna’s own design for De Gournay, an intricate floral motif that references her favourite Indian chintzes from the Coromandel Coast in the V&A’s South Asia rooms. True to form, she wanted it to feel as though one might have come in, peeled some paper off the wall and discovered the pattern underneath, with its ‘mouldy’ ground, as she describes it. It’s a statement of elegant intent: Joanna insists that, despite assumptions, decorative papers can be more soothing than you might imagine. ‘It doesn’t feel a lot,’ she says. ‘People think that pattern equals busy and actually it can be very restful.’
It’s not quite a town house, not quite a shop, not quite a showroom, not quite an office, but this home has something of all of these, as well as a sense of profound comfort. You’ve done it, and now you never have to do it again, I tell her, hovering on the doorstep. Besides, with an important Georgian house to finish in Ireland, a country house in Oxfordshire and two west London projects on the go, she surely has enough on her plate? ‘Well, we will probably put another bedroom and bathroom on the top,’ she confides, though having to navigate that extra flight also makes her hanker for a mews house: ‘I quite like the shake-up of living in a different way, and I can see the stairs might become an issue…’ Maybe not, then.
For more about Joanna Plant, visit joannaplant.com
A version of this story appears in the October 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
