DELICIOUSLY BEAUTIFUL

With a grand piano, three trees and lots of glittering gold, the home of leading cookery writer Skye McAlpine is ideal for Christmas gatherings

- FIONA MCCARTHY

When bestselling cookbook author Skye McAlpine wanted her new house in southwest London to feel immediately lived in, who better to call on than architect and interior designer Ben Pentreath for help? Together with Ben, a master of combining comfort with patina, Skye and her husband Anthony decided to strip their then newly purchased four-storey Victorian terrace house back to its very bare bones and start again from scratch.

The house, part of a row of Victorian terraced houses ‘cheaply and soullessly renovated’ by a property developer in the 1990s, had been on the market for a long time. Emptied of all its contents, ‘it looked incredibly sad,’ recalls Skye. ‘But it had a really good energy, which Ben felt too, with great ceiling heights and views of the park beyond an albeit busy road, which gave it a generous feeling of space.’

INSIDER INSIGHT Skye McAlpine shares her style vision and loves