Left In the hallway a work by the photographer
Kyle Weeks sits above a bespoke radiator cover/
console designed by Studio Ashby. The hand-
painted Teddy Tiger moneyboxes are from Liberty.
Opposite Sophie Ashby and Charlie Casely-
Hayford in their study. The Chess chair, covered
in fabric with a sound wave pattern, is by Sister,
while the Staccato rug is from the Rug CompanyA BOLD
MOVE
The east London rental of the creatives
Charlie Casely-Hayford and Sophie Ashby
once belonged to an interior design
legend – but the couple have still
managed to add their own eclectic touch
Here is a family living their best lives, but on
borrowed time. Not that they mind. “We moved in here
in March 2020 as a rental and we have to leave this
year,” says the interior designer Sophie Ashby, 34,
whose career has skyrocketed recently with the growth
of her design practice Studio Ashby and its product
line, Sister. “We’ll ultimately want to buy somewhere
close to a park, and this place will be about £2 million
out of our price range, but moving here was great
because it has let us be more daring with the interior
than we might be if it was a forever home.”
Ashby and her husband, the tailor and menswear
designer Charlie Casely-Hayford, 35, currently live in
many people’s dream home in Spitalfields, just off Brick
Lane. Since they moved in, just as London was closing
down in 2020, they have been joined by their baby, Gaia,
who is now nearly one. Casely-Hayford’s eight-year-old
daughter, Rainbow, also has her own playfully decorated
room for weekend stays, with a billowing stripy canopy
permanently above her bed. The Georgian house once
belonged to design and lifestyle author Jocasta Innes,
whose body of work included Paint Magic and The
Pauper’s Cookbook, a guide that could well have a renais-
sance 50 years after it was first published. When Innes
found the place in the late 1970s, her son, Jason, recalled
(in a piece written after her death) that it was “a doss-
house [...] from which she cleared 26 skips’ worth of
crap”. Today, Gilbert & George are building a new gallery
right next door, and the pull of the architecture that once
housed the Huguenots nearby has made it one of the
most fashionable neighbourhoods in Europe.
Digging through the internet there are numerous
images of the house when Innes was in residence, with
dappled paintwork and stencilled borders around each
room, thousands of books on the shelves and pictures
hung Victorian-style, floor to ceiling. Innes died in 2013,
but the handsome bones of this house are still here, and
all hers — the indestructible cabinetry in the kitchen and
wardrobes on the landing, the graphic brick flooring thatWords and photographs Mark C O’Flaherty