Bright And Bold

The artist Annie Morris’s colourful Islington home is a testament to her creativity.

- Lucy Halfhead

I get a strange feeling of familiarity when I arrive at Annie Morris’s Georgian townhouse in north London, and she welcomes me into a living room filled with countless paintings, sculptures, and illustrations. Since 2010, the house has belonged to Annie and her husband Idris Khan, two of Britain’s most successful contemporary artists, and their young children, Maude and Jago. “We actually renovated it using interiors of Charleston as inspiration,” she says. “I visited the property when I was a little girl and was mesmerised by the drawings all over its walls, fireplaces, and window sills.”

The Bloomsbury Group would certainly approve of the scene. In one corner is a pair of bespoke Ikea sofas, whose cushions have been embroidered with her whimsical sketches. There’s a Raqib Shaw painting above the mantelpiece, a huge photographic work by Khan in the hallway, and one of

Morris’s Stack sculptures, plaster spheres in vivid hues of ultramarine, viridian, and ochre arranged in a totem, most of which, she tells me, are currently assembled across the Atlantic for her first solo show with the Timothy Taylor gallery in New York. “We’ve also got this Tal R figure that Victoria Miro gave to us as a wedding present, and the kids are great with it—when they have friends over I hear them say, ‘Don’t touch the art please!’”