Northen lights

Inside the sleek Scandi-chic home of Brighton designer Anneli Fleming-Brown

- Nione Meakin

Anneli Fleming-Brown’s Brighton home is a masterclass in modern minimalism, all stark lines and soft colors. It’s a style that comes naturally to the designer, who spent every childhood summer in rural Finland with her Finnish mother and grandparents. “No one else had a house like ours when I was a child,” she smiles. “While everyone in the UK was still decorating their homes in a very traditional way, my parents were ripping out fireplaces and installing all-white units. Now that clean Scandi look has become fashionable but to me it just feels like home.”

When Anneli and her husband first saw the Victorian villa, in a leafy street in Seven Dials, it was being run as a boarding house by the elderly couple who owned it. “It definitely needed work. But there was something about it that we both found really appealing. Our children were young and it had the makings of a great family home.” Twenty years later, there’s no question that they have made it their own. The knocked-through kitchen and dining room, where the family cat Po slinks across the floorboards, was the first space they tackled and remains one of Anneli’s favorite rooms. Built-in shelves beneath the long worktops groan with well-thumbed cookbooks, while her striking giclee prints of cut vegetables hang above the oven: “My prints are often inspired by food because I love cooking. I’ll cook a different recipe every night.”