LILY ALLEN & DAVID HARBOUR

A FABULOUS APPETITE FOR BEAUTY AND ECCENTRICITY IS EVIDENT IN THIS BROOKLYN BROWNSTONE HOME OF THE SINGER AND ACTOR COUPLE, FASHIONED WITH THE HELP OF DESIGNER BILLY COTTON.

- MAYER RUS

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world at the Brooklyn town house of Lily Allen and David Harbour. Dressed in an intrepid pasticcio of chintz balloon shades, crystal chandeliers, pink silk, tiger-patterned textiles, and Mylar wallpaper, the home issues a full-throated rebuke to the current vogue for hushed good taste wrapped in a straitjacket of beige. With an able assist from US AD100 designer Billy Cotton and architect Ben Bischoff of MADE, Allen and Harbour have conjured a familial fantasyland of daring beauty and individual connoisseurial vision. In short, it's a knockout.

"Lily is the one who really set the tone and drove the programme. Every time I tried to make it calmer, she kept pushing and pushing for more," Cotton says of his adventurous, British-born client. Harbour, too, credits his formidable spouse for the stylistic bravura that propelled the idiosyncratic project. "Lily is someone who lives with colour in a deeper way than most. Her taste is bold, silly, fun, eccentric-it's exciting," says the Stranger Things actor and star of the recent blood-splattered Christmas spectacular Violent Night.

The canvas for the couple's freewheeling exercise in decorative derring-do is a stately late-19th-century Italianate brownstone in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens neighbourhood. "The façade was badly deteriorated, and the interior was...well, let's say it was very lived-in," Bischoff recalls of the house's precarious condition.