A relaxed modern home with classic style - Hackney London
02-01-2015
Eschewing trends in favour of reclaimed wood, vintage furniture and neutral walls, Alison Lloyd, the woman behind Ally Capellino, has created a home with lasting style.
The living room Photo: Rachael Smith
By Rachel Leedham
The home of Alison Lloyd, the director of the fashion brand Ally Capellino, is an upside- down maisonette in a Victorian conversion in Hackney, east London. With its kitchen shelf groaning with herbs and spices, substantial oak table and painted wooden floorboards, it has a homely, time-worn appeal that defies trends. ‘I’m sort of quite anti-trend, I suppose,’ she says.
Lloyd has lived here for 10 years. In that time she has been growing her accessories business, producing leather and canvas bags that exude the kind of minimalism and functionality for which Ally Capellino was feted in the 1980s and 1990s, when it also made clothing. Her customers are ‘mostly creatives, a lot of professional women and a disproportionate number of architects’. Lloyd herself favours one of her rucksacks – practical for cycling to and from her office and shop in Shoreditch.
Her home is, she admits, ‘a bit more cluttered’ than her designs. ‘I am a junk collector – I don’t really spend any money on anything,’ she says, pointing out a coffee table found in the woods and wheeled back to her previous home in Mile End, and two kitchen cupboards bought at the nearby Roman Road market and chopped in half to get them into the flat.
When Lloyd moved here, five years after sep-arating from her partner and Ally Capellino co-founder, Jono Platt (they have two grown-up children, Agnes and Hamish), the flat already had its inverted layout, with the kitchen and living room on the raised ground floor, and two bedrooms in the basement. On the half-landing between the levels was the bathroom, which Lloyd turned into a box room, carving space from each of the basement rooms to create two new bathrooms.
A year later she tackled the kitchen, installing French windows and an exterior staircase to access the garden from the upper level. ‘Originally the sink ran below the window, which was quite high, so you didn’t really get to see out of it,’ she recalls. The floor was painted off-black, a shade Lloyd reused when she commissioned the striking bookshelves that frame the opening between the living room and the kitchen.
When pressed as to where the name ‘Capellino’ came from, she confesses that she and Platt believed it to mean ‘little hat’ in Italian. ‘When we started out we were dressing the Ferrucci windows with little paper hats, and that gave us the idea. But we missed out a “p”. We were severely embarrassed when we started selling a lot to Italy.’ Of their first collection, which somewhat rebelliously cocked a snook at the hoopla surrounding the 1980 Moscow Olympics by featuring Russian lettering, old geographical illustrations and pictures of sporting techniques, she says, ‘I don’t think people would do that now, but in our ignorance it seemed like a good idea.’
On the basement level Lloyd has laid reclaimed pine boards and installed bedroom cupboards in tongue and groove, ‘because I had a nostalgic desire for it, I suppose’. Her bedroom overlooks the garden, her pride and joy, where she has recently added a new pond and traditional paving made from reclaimed terracotta roof tiles.
The second bedroom was used by Agnes, a photog-rapher, for a while – both she and Hamish, a graphic designer, now live locally – but it is currently in demand as a guest room. ‘I’m not very good on my own so I have a constant troupe of visitors. Often they come for a month or so at a time,’ Lloyd says. ‘This is quite a big flat, and it is much better with people in it.’
allycapellino.co.uk
The living room
PHOTO: Rachael Smith
A large bay window emphasises the high ceiling. The green sofa, an old design by Ligne Roset, adds a pop of vivid colour, as does the pouffe, from Larache (020-7729 7349). The printed lampshade is by Caroline Gray. Lloyd picked up the old seafaring trunk, used as a television stand, on Brick Lane. The bookshelves are painted the same colour as the floor, Off-Black by Farrow & Ball. ‘The room is big and bright enough to take this dark colour,’ Lloyd says. The Arts and Crafts chair came from Lloyd’s parents and has been recovered in the printed linen used for the curtains, which was left over from one of her fashion collections.
The kitchen
PHOTO: Rachael Smith
New French windows open the room up to the garden. Open shelves were added to incorporate the supporting column into the design of the kitchen. The table is made from a piece of oak that originally served as a countertop in the Ally Capellino store in Soho. The pendant light is from Ikea. ‘I’ve always been a white-walls person. I don’t have so much confidence in wall colours – I think they date a bit,’ Lloyd says. The woven chair came from her parents. A vintage painted cupboard and a shelf made from reclaimed oak give the kitchen a timeless quality. The worktop is made from salvaged Burmese teak. The chairs at the table were bought in a junk shop. The portrait of Lloyd and her son, Hamish, was painted for her 30th birthday by Theo Platt.
The bedroom
PHOTO: Rachael Smith 
PHOTO: Rachael Smith
Lloyd bought the bedspread in Sri Lanka. ‘It is a monk’s habit. They had every shade from lemon to dark red.’ The Georgian pine floorboards, reclaimed from a hospital, are from Antique Wooden Floors. The 1960s dress was bought in a vintage shop in Brighton.
The garden
PHOTO: Rachael Smith
The balcony and staircase, added by Lloyd, were built using galvanised steel and salvaged greenheart wood. With the help of the garden designer Robert Bratby, Lloyd redesigned the garden, which has a pond filled with striking plants such as gunnera and horsetail.