A New Leaf

Elizabeth Day and her husband embarked on a fresh chapter of their lives when they moved to their airy south-London home, which they have filled with fiction, mid-century furniture and a ginger feline friend.

- CHARLOTTE BROOK

Much like the writer and broadcaster herself, Elizabeth Day's home is chic, highly organised, welcoming and tall. The handsome Victorian townhouse sits on an elegant boulevard in south London, lined with silver birches from whose branches bluetits flutter; as I knock on the front door, I spy Huxley, Day's beloved ginger cat, keeping an eye on street happenings from a first-floor window ledge.

Best known for How to Fail, her chart-topping podcast, as well as for her novels and non-fiction, Day moved here in 2019 with her husband Justin Basini, a tech entrepreneur. As soon as they came across this particular street while house-hunting, the pair desperately wanted to live on it-but almost gave up the dream, at one point even making an offer on a property on another road nearby. "On paper, it was nice, but it just didn't have a great feeling," Day says, putting the kettle on in her kitchen, which looks out onto a prettily rambling back garden. "I told myself not to be ridiculous-that I can bring the feeling!" But she didn't have to: this house came on the market, and Day visited immediately. "As soon as I stepped in, I realised, "Oh, this is the gut reaction I've been wanting." It wasn't really about how it looked this house just feels right," she says.

All three of the floors-containing five bedrooms, including three for Day's stepchildren have high ceilings and walls painted white. "We like the idea of home being calm and light," she says. "White allows us to keep the sense of space, and add colour through furniture, art and objects we love." As she and her husband moved here from small flats, with very little furniture-Day had left her previous marriage with nothing larger than her great-great-grandmother's wooden trunk, which now sits in her bedroom-decorating the house was one of their first joint enterprises.