The house at the end of St. Peter’s Street in Islington does not look, from the outside, like the most interesting interior in London. It is a Georgian terrace, four storeys of London stock brick, identical to its neighbours in every particular except one: there is a fig tree growing out of the first-floor window. Not a potted fig on a windowsill — a proper fig, its trunk emerging from the interior of the house, its branches spreading across the facade, its roots, I would later discover, growing through the floor of what used to be the master bedroom and into the ground below. The tree has been there for twelve years. It produces fruit every September.
The house belongs to Clara Havelock, an interior designer who has spent two decades systematically dissolving the boundary between her home and her garden. What began as a simple renovation — knock through the back wall, add a glass extension, create the obligatory indoor-outdoor flow that every estate agent in London promises and few deliver — became something more radical. ‘I realised,’ she told me, leading me through a hallway where a passionflower vine was trained across the ceiling, ‘that I was not interested in bringing the garden into the house. I was interested in making it impossible to tell which was which.’
The rooms
The kitchen, at the back of the ground floor, is the most conventional space, and even it is not conventional. A wall of sliding glass opens onto a courtyard garden designed by Havelock herself, with a single Amelanchier tree at its centre, underplanted with ferns and hellebores. The kitchen island is made from a slab of English walnut, and above it hangs a chandelier that is not a chandelier but an armature of twisted willow branches, threaded with fairy lights and the dried stems of last summer’s sweet peas. ‘I wanted to eat breakfast under a tree,’ she said, ‘so I built a tree.’
Upstairs, things get stranger and more beautiful. The first-floor sitting room has no sofa — instead, a long, low platform is built into the bay window, cushioned with linen mattresses and piled with sheepskins, overlooking the street through a curtain of the fig tree’s leaves. The floor is terracotta tile, unglazed and slightly uneven, so that walking across it feels like walking across a Mediterranean terrace. The walls are limewashed in a warm, earthy pink that Havelock mixed herself from natural pigments. The room smells of figs and woodsmoke, even in June.
The bathroom, on the half-landing, is the house’s most famous room. It has no roof — or rather, it has a retractable glass roof that opens to the sky — and the shower is a rainfall head mounted on a branch of oak that has been bolted to the wall. The floor is pebbles, set in concrete, so that showering feels like standing in a stream. Boston ferns grow from the walls. Orchids are mounted on pieces of cork bark above the bath. ‘I wanted to bathe in a forest,’ Havelock said, as if this were the most normal desire in the world. ‘So I built a forest.’
The philosophy
Havelock’s approach is not, she insists, about money — though the house, by any estimate, has cost a great deal of it. It is about patience. The fig tree took five years to establish. The passionflower took three to cover the hallway ceiling. The roof garden, on the top floor, is still a work in progress — a collection of sedums, grasses, and herbs that Havelock is slowly editing, plant by plant, season by season. ‘Gardens are not built,’ she said. ‘They are grown. And houses that want to be gardens must learn to grow, too.’
This philosophy — that a home should evolve rather than be completed — runs counter to almost everything the interior design industry stands for, with its six-week renovations and its before-and-after reveals and its insistence that a room can be ‘finished.’ Havelock’s house will never be finished. There will always be another plant to add, another wall to limewash, another window to replace with something that lets in more light. ‘The house is a garden,’ she said, as we sat in the roof garden, drinking tea from enamel mugs while bees moved through the lavender at our feet. ‘And a garden is never done. That is the whole point.’
