12 February 6, 2022The Sunday TimesHome
PHOTOGRAPHY: LORNE CAMPBELL/GUZELIAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES; MAKEUP: LAUREN CURTIS, @MAKEUPBYLAURENCURTIS
remembers driving past and peering
through the iron gates. When she and
her husband, Nick Wilson, 48, were
house-hunting they couldn’t agree on
what kind of property would suit. “I
was looking at Victorian crumbling
terraced houses. Nick was looking at
penthouses in the city centre that
were just like big white boxes.”
Murphy saw that Chatelaine was
on the market with a guide price of
£350,000 and arranged a viewing.
“The first time I walked through the
door, we were in the hallway and I just
burst into tears. It was this massive
emotion. This is where I’m meant to
be.” Wilson, wearing Vivienne
Westwood and an air of fond
resignation, is rolling his eyes at this
point in the tale. Murphy explains:
“Nick was like, ‘You’re meant to say
it needs a lot of work. As soon as
you’ve cried, we’ve got to pay the full
asking price.’ ”
Murphy’s first love was fashion.I
f anyone can shake us out of
our February funk it’s Siobhan
Murphy. Stepping through the
front door of her art deco home
is like emerging from black-and-
white Kansas into Technicolor Oz. As
Dorothy might have said, I’ve a feeling
we’re not in West Yorkshire any more.
The interiors of Chatelaine, Murphy’s
jawdropping home, have been made
over in the designer’s flamboyant,
playful maximalist style, familiar to
followers of @interiorcurve. It’s
exuberant. It’s unapologetic. It’s
audacious. “It’s a tearing up of the
rulebook and designing with your
heart rather than your head,” Murphy
says. “If you like something, why not
just give it a whirl?”Murphy, 43, burst on to our TV
screens last year in a rainbow of
colours, a cacophony of clashing
prints and a variety of vividly coloured
wigs as a competitor on Interior Design
Masters, the BBC2 decorating
challenge. Moving into Chatelaine in
2018 kick-started her creativity and
was her passport to the show, when
researchers spotted her interior
styling on Instagram. “Getting the
house was a turning point for me in
everything. It kind of just gave me the
project of my dreams and the career of
my dreams. Maybe that’s why I got so
emotional that day when we first
walked in,” she says.
Built in 1934, Chatelaine is a curvy
white three-storey building with a
tower, like an art deco ocean liner
run aground at the end of a modest
terrace in Castleford, near Wakefield.
“I just loved this house for years. I’ve
always loved it from being little,” says
Murphy, who grew up in Leeds andBRING
ON THE
JOY
Never judge a home by its cover: the interior designer Siobhan Murphy’s house is white on the outsid
for a more creative career when she
and Wilson, a solicitor specialising in
employment law, met in 2008. “When
we first got together I said I want to go
travelling and he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do
it.’ So we took six months off and it
made me re-evaluate where I wanted
to be what I wanted to do.” References
to the places they loved — including
Hollywood, Morocco and Bangkok —
are woven into their home. A
surprising number of references
per square inch. “I’m influenced by
so much, it can be a blessing and a
curse,” Murphy says.
Her husband is not a natural
maximalist. “I quite like big open
spaces,” he says. “I like white, because
it gives the impression of space.” The
couple enjoy teasing each other about
his aesthetic journey. Murphy says:
“Remember when I stripped the
wallpaper in the reception room and it
was back to white walls, and you said
[hopeful voice], ‘Ooh are you leaving it“When I was a kid I was constantly
drawing fashions. It would always be a
woman in a fishtail outfit — it was the
1980s.” She studied fashion and
accessories at Leeds College of Art
then went on to do courses in
millinery. When Harvey Nichols came
to Leeds in 1996 Murphy was a
Saturday girl, dressed head to foot in
black. “Being plus-sized, there was a
time I fell out of love a little with
fashion, thinking I want to wear that
designer’s clothes, I want to go to the
high street and pick what I want
instead of going to the sad little area
at the back where the size 16-plus is.
There was a time when I thought
interiors was somewhere I could go
wild, even if I can’t get the clothes. I
think I can do both now. The house,
your face, your body — everything to
me is a canvas.”
Frustrated by her no-fun corporate
role as a communications manager in
the NHS, Murphy had started to yearnKATRINA
BURROUGHS
@Kat_Burroughs