The story of how Samuel Ross discovered his family's Victorian house reads as if it were pulled straight from a novel. In the early days of launching his menswear brand, A-Cold-Wall*, the fashion designer would take day trips to London to pick up his freshly cut garments before catching the train back to Northamptonshire. He would walk past the property on his way home from the station, pushing his pieces in a trolley. ‘I was in awe of how magnificent the façade was,’ he says of the building, which features a pitched canopy roof and pillars bookending the front door.
Samuel and his partner Jennifer, a ceramicist, bought the four-bedroom home in September 2019 before moving in with their baby, Genesis, now five and a half, the following May. (They’ve since been joined by Olympia, aged one and a half.) Constructed in 1879 by fruit merchants, the house has been owned by just two families, which means many of the original features have been carefully preserved. ‘There’s a lot of fruit detailing throughout the house, from the stained glass of apples and berries, to the original cornicing details in the hallways,’ Samuel says. This was one of the biggest attractions for the couple when deciding to buy the property. ‘It wasn’t just intact; it had been taken care of,’ he says, while describing the original oak frames the pair uncovered on the front windows and the ‘immaculate’ ceiling plastering. Another factor was the proximity to Samuel’s childhood home, just one road away. ‘We wanted to be relatively close to my family, for a layer of support,’ he says. Growing up, his father – a Central Saint Martins fine-art graduate who studied alongside Damien Hirst – would craft stained-glass windows in a studio bolted to the side of their house. ‘It was a soft influence on why we wanted a period home,’ says Samuel, ‘this notion of permanence associated with the building materials.’
When it came to the eight-month-long renovation, the couple focused on, ‘respecting their property in its original state’, accord- ing to Jennifer, rather than changing its structure. In addition to opening the existing fireplaces and adding another, a Victorian cast-iron model found on eBay, to the bedroom, the couple directed their attention to paint washes and restoring old floorboards. When Samuel was a child, his parents would resand and relacquer the floors of their house every two years (‘The relationship to craft was embedded in our home’) and, similarly, Samuel and Jennifer sanded and lacquered the floorboards of the reading and living rooms in a dark-ebony hue, ‘which is typically what you’d see in a Caribbean or West African home,’ explains Samuel, citing his Windrush heritage. The upstairs floors, meanwhile, are painted in a satin coat of Brilliant White to ‘emit a softer feeling’.
Rather than hide the history of the property, Samuel and Jennifer revelled in peeling back layers to expose its origins, nota- bly by keeping the dining room’s cracked 19th-century floor tiles, stripping away ‘extremely opinionated wallpaper’ and adding a plaster wash to the walls. ‘Every time we peeled back the surfaces, we revealed distinct memories,’ Samuel says of the din- ing room, which is separated from the plant-filled conservatory by an original sash window, and features a diagonal beam in one wall that serves as a focal point to the room.
One of the biggest challenges of the renovation was finding the balance between the two artists’ aesthetics. ‘My interiors style is a bit more eclectic, whereas Samuel’s is very minimal and temple-like,’ says Jennifer. Samuel notes that every piece, from the Hay Mags sofa, upholstered in Hallingdal 65 fabric by Kvadrat, in the living area to the two 1960s Pierre Paulin chairs in the reading room, purchased from Pamono ‘before the trend cycle hit’, was carefully deliberated over. ‘It’s been a mediation on creating a home that everyone feels that they own a part of, stylistically and in terms of comfort.’
The emphasis on memory and meaning suffuses the house. Recalling the West African masks from her childhood home in Sweden, Jennifer has placed memorabilia from that region on the reading room’s mantelpiece, alongside canvases painted by the couple (‘We move artwork around the home quite frequently to get a feel for it’) and the Edo-period Benin bronze sculptural head. ‘We’ve tried to cultivate a minimal take, but add a layer of decadence,’ says Samuel, pointing out the room’s art deco tempered-glass bookshelf housing books on West African history and art, a chiselled block of granite from Japan and the stacked Takashi Murakami Kaikai Kiki pillows.
One of the most impressive aspects of the property is also the most hidden: an 86-square-metre basement art studio, which runs the length of the house through six adjoining rooms, and contains Jennifer’s pottery wheel and countless easels – there’s even one for Genesis. ‘It’s a part of my professional practice, but it’s an intimate one,’ Samuel says of this space. ‘Having it connected to the home, which fundamentally is so far away from the atelier and the industrial-design studio at 180 The Strand [central London], puts you in a different mindset. The work we produce in the home becomes more sacred.’
Katie O'Malley is the Site Director on ELLE UK. On a daily basis you’ll find Katie managing all digital workflow, editing site, video and newsletter content, liaising with commercial and sales teams on new partnerships and deals (eg Nike, Tiffany & Co., Cartier etc), implementing new digital strategies and compiling in-depth data traffic, SEO and ecomm reports. In addition to appearing on the radio and on TV, as well as interviewing everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Rishi Sunak PM, Katie enjoys writing about lifestyle, culture, wellness, fitness, fashion, and more.
