Fresh Luxe

Liza and Matt’s fabulous family home pitches amazing art and glamorous lighting against a cool white backdrop oozing with organic installations of growing greenery.

- Serena Fokschaner

Liza

Giles is an artist and stylist with ‘an addiction to colour’ and rummaging through market stalls for vintage finds. Her husband Matt is an architect ‘into straight lines and modernity’. The result of this aesthetic collision? Not domestic strife, but their south London home, where white-walled spaces sing with vibrant artwork and lean-lined furniture rubs shoulders with slubby linens and antique finds in an adroit marriage of compromise.

It was the lofty proportions of the house that drew them in the first place. ‘We’d been living on the same street when it came up for sale. So we pounced, moving our things in with a wheelbarrow,’ says Liza, laughing. Double-fronted but unloved, the house had done duty as a social club, then a family home. ‘All the period details had been ripped out and there was plasterboard everywhere,’ says Liza. But training their professional gaze beyond the partition walls, the pair could see it had incredible potential.