THE ROYAL TREATMENT

ACTOR OLIVIA COOKE TAPS ATELIER LK TO HELP TRANSFORM A RUN-OF-THE-MILL EAST LONDON VICTORIAN INTO A HOME FIT FOR A QUEEN

- HANNAH MARTIN

IN ACTOR OLIVIA COOKE'S EAST LONDON TOWN HOUSE, DESIGNED BY STUDIO LK, A CUSTOM SOFA AND RUG SIT WITH A LOUIS SOGNOT ARMCHAIR, AN ANDREW PIERCE SCOTT COCKTAIL TABLE, AND A 1960s FLOOR LAMP. OPPOSITE COOKE, HANGING OUT IN THE LIVING ROOM. FASHION STYLING BY JAMIE MIZRAHI.

I wanted it to feel like an old cigar-slash-'70s shag pad," says actor Olivia Cooke with a laugh, recalling the unconventional brief she gave her interior designers, Lisa Jones and Ruby Kean of the London- and New York-based firm Atelier LK. "But then I also wanted it to have this sort of Japanese-slash-château vibe." That last bit feels particularly fitting for Cooke, who most know as Queen Alicent Hightower, the cunning second wife of King Viserys I Targaryen in HBO's hit series House of the Dragon.

If her freewheeling mood board comes off as indecision, it isn't. Cooke knows what she wants. In fact, her house hunt was hardly a hunt. This 1860s Victorian in east London is the only place she saw. Call it an actor's intuition, but she knew it in her gut. "It had a really lovely feeling," she recalls. "The neighborhood was very quiet as well; a bit like a village within London."

The atmosphere might have been perfect, but the house needed, in Cooke's words, "a page-one rewrite." When a friend put her in touch with Jones and Kean, they instantly clicked. The designers loved the evocative way Cooke articulated her vision—and they were game to coax the references on her Pinterest board, which ranged from Frank Gehry's 1970s Santa Monica home to the Chateau Marmont, into this 19th-century English house.