Inside Celebrity Homes: Florence Welch’s London Home

Celebrity Style | Oct 29, 2020

Inside Celebrity Homes: Florence Welch’s London Home – Welch’s new digs in South, a mere ten-minute walk from her mother’s residence, is a charmingly livable, small-scale Georgian house—probably originally a worker’s cottage, maybe for an employee of the gasworks that still looms at the end of the block. She chose the area not only for the proximity to Mom’s but because, she says, “the color of the gasworks is so beautiful—I wanted my living room to be that color! It’s like someone turned a smoke machine on.” Plus, she adds, in this part of the city you can round a corner and catch a glimpse of the London Eye or the flags flying high above Parliament.

“I went from singing at the Met ball to coming home and sleeping on a mattress in my mom’s living room,” recollects Florence Welch, explaining why, at the age of 26, she has just acquired her first home, and not a moment too soon. “I really needed to move out—my clothes had taken over my bedroom and my brother’s room! My space looked like an old lady’s brain explosion.”

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The singer, who has taken a year off from touring to regroup and spend quality time in the studio, describes her new place as a sanctuary, albeit one with crooked door frames and what Welch calls “wonky” stairs. “It’s like being drunk or on a ship—I think it suits me.” To quickly make this house a home, she introduced small changes that ended up having an outsize impact: putting red-and-white bull’s-eye porcelain doorknobs on the kitchen cupboards, creating a “Renaissance corner” with prints and tapestries, and, most strikingly, devoting an entire floor to her ever-expanding clothing collection. Racks heave with vintage velvet cloaks, ermine capelets, and spangled frocks; the green paillette-embroidered Givenchy couture number with the notorious dinosaur bumps that she wore to the Grammys hangs nonchalantly on the back of a door; a dazzling Deco dressing gown becomes an impromptu curtain.

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Welch collaborated with interior designer Carolyn Benson, a family friend, to reimagine the space and source the furniture, which is mostly English and includes a vast desk in a study that is crowded with Florence ephemera: tomes on Diaghilev and Basquiat; McSweeney’s postcards; a note that reads, “You cannot burn what is already on fire”; a framed caricature of her grandfather Colin Welch, a former deputy editor at The Daily Telegraph.