To be honest, Paloma Faith never wanted to buy her current London townhouse. Rather, when the British pop singer—whose The Architect: Zeitgeist Edition album is out now—was on the hunt for a new home about a year ago, she was determined to find (or create) something that matched her sequined-speckled personality. “I was looking at all these unusual properties, like derelict churches, or an old swimming pool, or an old bodega,” she says of some of the unconventional spaces her search turned up. Try as she might, though, getting her dream home in any of these coveted places, sadly, required too much repair. So Faith eventually settled on a conventional, white-walled three-bedroom townhouse. But, as it turns out, a blank canvas was the perfect starting point for Faith to pile on her brand of eclectic glamour.
Faith shares the townhouse with her boyfriend, artist Leyman Lahcine, and their child (whose name and gender she does not share publicly), but make no mistake—the house is all Paloma. “Every room is a reflection of who I am,” she says of decorating without any professional help. “I was completely determined to do it by myself. It’s all from my mind.” That includes the kitchen's black and pink color scheme—even the fridge is a bubbly shade of bubblegum—and the living room’s leopard print sofa and the rainbow-lit Christmas tree adorned with ornaments of dead icons, from Amy Winehouse to Frida Kahlo to David Bowie. And just when you start to think that her mind must be a fever dream of multicolor patterns and brassy melodies, Faith startles you with a slightly basic detail that makes you think, for just a second, that she’s maybe one of us: an avocado toast ornament on her tree, “because I love avocado toast,” she says.
Faith also loves to find economical ways to show off her tricked-out taste, whether that means scouring the internet for antiques or visiting her favorite vintage shop in town, Couilles Du Chien (literal translation from French: The Dog’s Bollocks). “I was in a movie once with [screenwriter and director] Terry Gilliam, and he said something that really inspired me, because it’s so much how I live my life,” she says. “He said, ‘Remember to never compromise your ideas. Think of what your actual dream will be, and you figure out a way of doing it, irrespective of budget.’” To Faith, this translated into decorating the funhouse she’d always wanted while getting creative about costs. Many of the items she sourced from eBay, such as her sofa, which she bought in cream pleather because she liked the shape, then had reupholstered in leopard Ralph Lauren fabric. Another eBay find? The du Gournay–inspired mint-green chinoiserie wallpaper in her living room. The painting above the fireplace? She picked it up at the Affordable Art Fair. “I went around to all the most expensive stores I could to find what I actually wanted, and then I tried to make it or find it cheaper somewhere else,” she says, “which sums me up as a person.”
But if there were one room that encapsulates Faith the most, it would be her walk-in closet, a pink-and-white-striped wonderland of nostalgia-inspired costumes, candy-colored wigs, and several shelves of shoes. “When I was a broke artist I rented a small room, and I was doing my music, I was doing cabaret, and I was a magician's assistant, so I had all of these elaborate costumes,” Faith says. But without a proper closet at the time, she’d surrounded her bed with four clothing racks. Now, Faith's wardrobe, an entire small room, is where she goes for peace, serenity, and to create new characters for her onstage self. “If I was going to describe my house as a body, my wardrobe would be the heart,” she says. And even though it’s not a crumbling church or a vintage swimming pool, Faith knows that wherever her heart is, so is home, too.
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