When garden designer Miria Harris and her chef husband Tom Harris were house-hunting back in 2006, their wishlist was short: a real fire and some outside space. They found both in their late-Victorian terraced cottage, with its original cast-iron fireplace and neglected garden, all scruffy grass and overgrown shrubs.
The pair had met at a party five years earlier. “Tom introduced me to good food. Before that, I lived on crisps and petrol station fare,” Miria says. They scraped the money to buy this house in London, sharing with a friend at first, to help with the bills and their piecemeal renovation.
“We just chipped away at it whenever we could afford to, and gradually it evolved into a family home,” Tom says – not least because of the arrival of their children, Carter, now eight, and Peggy, six, plus a couple of cats.
The couple have painted the house in light, muted shades, “mostly shot through with green – my favourite colour”, Miria says, with the floors, shelving and mid-century furniture providing plenty of warm wood. The house is full of artworks, including pieces by artist friends, vintage maps and posters they both love to collect. An old ice-cream advertising board in the kitchen was bought as a reminder that Tom wooed Miria with homemade ice-cream when they were dating.
The closest they’ve come to structural work was to move the garden door from the side return to the back of the house. “The view from the house is really important. We wanted to see greenery from the moment we came in, not a sink full of dishes,” Miria says.
Such an idea might not seem surprising, given Miria’s job; but when she moved here she was still immersed in her first career as a contemporary art curator, working with artists including Richard Wentworth. “I grew up in the Nottinghamshire countryside, but this was my first garden as an adult,” she says. “Having an outdoor space unlocked lots of garden memories from my childhood, and that triggered my change of career.”
