Member Stories
Olive Haller
Olive Haller is the visionary designer behind her award winning ex-council house in South West London, well known to others as This Northcote Home. We join her (and her two dachshunds – Gaston and Basile) over coffee…
“What we recreated here was a vibe we absolutely loved when visiting Marrakesh. We went there back in 2018. It was my first time, and I absolutely fell in love with all the textures that you see over there. All the irregularity, the plaster walls everywhere, the crazy tiling on the floor, all the colours. I absolutely love that. And as there’s not that much colour in our home, because it’s quite neutral with all the pinks and the soft wood, we do try to incorporate as much texture as we can.
We used the plaster in the entire house to recreate that warmth. It’s not a very sleek finish, but I think that’s what we were after. Some sort of lived-in feeling. There are already marks in the plaster, but I don’t actually mind that. Everything that we have in the house is very raw. You need to come in the house and feel comfortable, and feel happy to sit down and put your feet up.
We get a lot of people say, ‘Oh, it looks like we’re in the Mediterranean’.
I didn’t go for a holiday home vibe. I just think we incorporated everything that we like…there’s no rule here, really. We’re sitting on a Chesterfield sofa, and that’s a hand-me-down from my parents, and yet, we’re not in a gentleman’s club. But I think it works, because if you really love it you’ll make it work.
As a kid, we travelled quite a bit with my parents. I was born in Paris, but I ended up living in the French Caribbean islands for a long time. The vibe there was totally different. And before that, my parents lived in Africa, and so obviously, every time they went somewhere they would buy things and bring it home. And yet, somehow it works. And I think that’s probably where I get my design philosophy from.
Coming to London, I absolutely love the British interior aesthetic, but I think I would find it quite hard putting one together.
“I definitely think artwork finishes any space. It’s the final touch to making a space homely. I don’t think your home is finished if you have bare walls…”
Art’s role in a scheme
“I definitely think artwork finishes any space. It’s the final touch to making a space homely. I don’t think your home is finished if you have bare walls…it can sometimes be someone’s deliberate style, but I find that as soon as you put something on the wall, it makes it feel warm and it finishes a home. It can be quite stressful to find the right piece. You can be quite eager to finish off a house, and just buy something, and not be sure about it. That was my issue with the space in the kitchen.
It’s hard to experiment and in some cases hard to imagine whether something will be the right fit. If I had walked past it [a textured sea scape by Hannah Ivory Baker] I would have thought, yeah, it looks nice, but probably not in my house. And that’s where probably I went wrong with how I searched for art, because it obviously works really well. And also because of the plaster walls, it’s not necessarily easy to find something that works on plaster. When you go into a gallery, everything looks great because it’s on a white wall and all you’re looking at is the artwork. You’re not thinking about it in the context of your home. Will it work? Does it go with the colouring? Will it work with my furniture? Will it work with the atmosphere?
I think it’s really important to find the right pieces, and that’s something that you guys do very well.”
