At home with textiles designer Neisha Crosland
Textiles designer Neisha Crosland has transformed a derelict garage into a glamorous home
It was while she was attending a talk at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, during the first year of a graphic design course, that Neisha Crosland realised where her future lay. Wandering into the museum’s textile galleries, she was struck by the display of oriental fabrics, and was so bowled over that she headed straight back to Camberwell College of Arts, buttonholed the dean, and changed not just her study course but the course of her life. Now, 30 years on, her textiles are inspired by everything from Elizabethan wallhangings to 20th-century paintings. Her work, with its recognisable sense of space, form, line and colour, graces grand London hotels such as Claridge’s and The Berkeley, as well as countless homes. These days, along with gorgeous hand-embroidered fabrics, she designs wallpapers, tiles and porcelain. She’s also collaborating on a range of shoes for the Japanese.
Neisha handpaints her immaculate designs in studios that are attached to her living space. Her family home, shared with husband Stephane and their sons, Oscar,
20, and Samuel, 17, is a labour of love that has taken 22 years. From handles on the steel doors and windows she designed to mercurymirrored double doors into her bathroom, and tassels attached to door keys, there isn’t an unconsidered corner. The buttermilk, vine-trained buildings grouped around a
walled courtyard garden are redolent of the South of France in the 1930s, which isn’t surprising since one source of inspiration is the Colombe d’Or hotel on the Côte d’Azur, the haunt of artists since the 1930s.
Yet this magical home hasn’t always been so elegant. Near noisy Clapham Junction, one of the busiest railway stations in Britain, the house was once a two-storey garage in a bombed-out cobbled mews. Neisha bought the 5,500 sq ft site before she married Stephane, who works in finance. The first phase was to convert the building so it was habitable, and sort out a basic garden, digging up the concrete and planting evergreens, as well as agapanthus in pots that could be moved around as building progressed. Winter jasmine now covers one wall.
Juggling work, time and money, Neisha had to save up between phases. The first took a year and was hell, she says, with endless dust. In
1999, with their second son on the way, the couple needed more room. They bought a two-storey building on the other side of the plot, and linked it to the first. The final, major phase, from 2005 to 2007, pulled everything together.
Between the two buildings, Neisha designed a dining room and living room, and a long, industrial kitchen that acts both as a room and a wide corridor, with an oak wood-block floor and steel-and-marble
‘Designing a house is like Google Earth – you start with the big picture, then work down in fine detail,’ SAYS NEISHA
units by her interior designer sister, Charlotte Crosland.
A French Lacanche eight-burner stove dominates the kitchen and a row of blue Le Creuset casseroles resemble fat ducks. Steel windows that Neisha designed run along one wall. Above the kitchen, with a long, ironwork balcony, again by Neisha, an office looks down on the elegant garden, where she replaced the cobbles with Yorkstone because of its mellower, lighter
colour. In the cosy sitting room, the fireplace was made by a Polish master plasterer to her sketch. ‘I left the drawing and when I came back he’d almost finished,’ she says.
Her paintings are scattered throughout. Comfortable sofas are heaped with cushions in her textiles, seen again in the curtains, while a gilded mural by painter Ian Harper is punctured by a stunning oval window.
In the dining room, two magnificent chandeliers – great airy nests of metal oak leaves – hang above a long oak table, while the walls hold mirrored industrial window frames plus works of art, some by Neisha, and another Harper mural, Japanese in style.
Upstairs the master bedroom and ensuite is an elegant reinvention of 1930s glamour, from its thick, white wool carpet, which runs into the pale ivory-pink bathroom, to the pleated voile both at the windows and backing the extraordinarily beautiful mirrored doors that Neisha designed. ‘I started with the handles, which might have come from a Mughal palace, and worked from there,’ she says.
‘Designing a house is like Google Earth – you start with the big picture, then work down and down in increasingly fine detail. But if you get the floors, the radiators, the door handles, the lighting, the light switches and the taps right, the rest will follow.’