Sacred Beryl

Featured on the cover of this month's World of Interiors is the North London home of the late and great Beryl Bainbridge. Her home is ghoulish to say the least: a dusty shrine to Catholicism and Englishness. Half filled ashtrays lay strewn throughout the house, a clear indication of her affliction and struggle to break the habit. The house itself is a beautiful Edwardian shell, she bought it with her first husband Austin Davies in the late 1960s, gutting it and then turning it into a whitewashed Modernist space. When they separated, Beryl gradually and wholeheartedly stamped her insignia into each and every room, the house soon morphed into a mad, late Victorian den, a macabre curation of curiosities and objects. The house has shiny brown lacquer on every surface, dark furniture cramping up the tiny rooms, moth eaten taxidermy, sacred hearts and black linoleum upon the floors. Within every fibre and particle of this bizarrely beautiful interior is the essence of a woman who not only wrote, but lived, laughed and loved abundantly.