How a young antique dealer used creativity and ingenuity to create a deeply sophisticated flat
The London flat of interior designer and dealer Georgie Stogdon illustrates her pared-back aesthetic and balanced approach to budgeting, which meant she was able to splash out on a few key areas, including a spectacular new staircase
Every object has a voice - and, just as with choral music, the key to harmony is elegant arrangement. Being able to avoid the cacophony of clutter is a skill with which few are endowed, but interior designer Georgie Stogdon is one of them. Her home in north London is a masterclass in the kind of decorating many aspire to: not too much, nor too little. Careful, clever consonance.
Such clarity is hard to pull off, but Georgie's eye was honed young. With an antique dealer for a mother and an auctioneer for a grandfather, much of her childhood was spent being 'carted to sale rooms and looking at beautiful things'. It stood her in good stead when, in 2015, having decided to leave the charity sector, she Googled interior design jobs. Seeing the role of assistant to Rose Uniacke advertised, she applied - and landed the job.
Later, working with Steven Rodel (now creative director of Guy Goodfellow Interiors and Architectural Design) would give Georgie the skills to run a project herself, but the three years she spent with Rose proved invaluable training. Though she was not working on the design aspect of projects, she says, ‘I picked everything up through osmosis - seeing the way that Rose thought and the spaces she created.’ In her own home, the influence of Rose - the pin-up of pared-back interiors and queen of understated statement - is clear. Nothing in this late-Victorian split-level flat is extraneous.
Readers will be reassured to learn, however, that for all the gorgeousness, perfection lies in the imperfections here. For every grand flourish - an 18th-century Spanish refectory table, a Derbyshire fossil chimneypiece - there is something lower key (though nonetheless lovely). The stuffed seagull on top of a pantry cupboard has only one eye, for instance, and the vast textile looming over the dining table has ‘a nice amount of holes in it’, says Georgie.
All this is to say that she is not drawn to market value, instead following her heart. It's not a name or a date she seeks but ‘a feeling’. Her absolute favourite thing in the house cost £4: a pair of Chinese silk paintings of horses hanging in the sitting room, which she found in a charity shop. Georgie has put her talent for treasure-hunting to good use, selling the riches she cannot quite squeeze into her home via her online shop Curios. It is suitably named, not just for the rarities stocked on its virtual shelves, but because Georgie's love of things is shaped by her curiosity about the stories behind them: ‘Where did you come from? Who made you? How many hands have touched you? How many people have admired you?’
Her eye for a gem was also what landed Georgie this flat. It was one of the first places that she and her partner Olly viewed when considering a move in 2021. ‘I fell in love with the scale of it,’ she says. ‘It's like a house in the sky.’ On the second floor of a tall townhouse and wending into the loft space, its views of a zigzagging tessellation of London roofs and of Arsenal's Emirates stadium are staggering. ‘On match day, it's buzzing,’ says Georgie. Olly has a season ticket. ‘I can hear when they score,’ she adds with a smile. ‘And know whether he'll be coming home via the pub’. Such is Olly's devotion that she's even made one small decorative concession - a framed photograph of Thierry Henry: ‘He's a beautiful man..’
The flat needed a lot of work, though nothing major structurally. That said, Georgie did decide to replace the uppermost staircase to the third floor. ‘I didn't feel bad - it was ugly and blocked the light,’ she says, pointing to an extraordinary sash window nearly three metres tall, fitted with 18 panes of ever-so-slightly uneven 19th-century glass. The replacement staircase she designed is equally extraordinary - a helter-skelter helix of oak, with open treads and slim handrails that cast shifting shadows on the soaring walls. It is extravagantly, lavishly beautiful (if currently a touch impractical for the couple's two-year-old daughter Winter, whose bedroom is at the top of it). The incontrovertible modernism of the structure could feel at odds with the history of the property, but the purity of the new marries quietly with the classicism of the building's Victorian construction. It is a feeling echoed throughout, in fact, where walls in creamy white ‘Galao Il’ by Francesca's Paints are the backdrop to the meticulously chosen objects and artworks.
