I’VE ALWAYS BEEN attracted to houses, and I’ve always been interested in how our living spaces affect us. After my first child was born, I spent a lot of time walking around the streets of the London neighbourhood where I then lived, looking at houses from different eras, trying to absorb their atmosphere and imagine what sort of life went on in there. I made so many trips to see interesting houses for sale that I was on first-name terms with many of the local estate agents. I always took time to speak to the elderly people I met on my walks, who had lived in the area for a long time and had fascinating stories to tell. I guess you could say that house spotting saved me from the often tiresome and draining first year at home with a newborn baby.
I had lived in London for around eight years when we bought our first house, a very traditional, yellow-brick end of terrace built at the end of the 1930s. When we moved in I spent a considerable amount of time researching the history of the house, much like when you fall in love with someone and want to know every detail of their past. A walk through a house can be a walk through time.
The house had a traditional end of terrace layout, with three small bedrooms upstairs and socialising areas downstairs. I lived there with my husband and our young son Noah, as well as a lovely au pair from Sweden called Ida. When we moved in we tore out the carpets to expose the floorboards, painted the walls white and opened up some of the rooms to create larger, airier spaces to socialise in. We didn’t have any curtains or blinds and we didn’t own a television – all of which added to the idea that ours was a very ‘Swedish’ house in this suburban neighbourhood. The idea of what constitutes a Swedish interior may have changed since then – it certainly isn’t about white walls any more – but many clichés still abound.
Today I live in a house on the outskirts of Stockholm, built by the Slovenian architect Radovan Halper in 1968. Halper’s dream was to develop a prototype for a house that could be bought flat packed and erected on the type of difficult terrain normally deemed impossible to build on. The house has the look of a mushroom, with the entrance in the small stem and a spiral staircase leading up to the living area in the cap. It’s built on a load-bearin
