Yahoo News At home with W.A. Green founder Zoe Anderson in Finsbury Park
‘It’s all about having things that make me feel happy,’ says Zoe Anderson as she shows me around her home, a Victorian terrace in Finsbury Park. Comforting and cocoon-like, the living room walls have been painted a sumptuous green (Farrow & Ball’s Green Smoke), brightened up by Designers Guild pea green velvet curtains and a teal velvet chair, while the luxuriously long mole cotton velvet sofa from Ligne Roset was, says the owner of cult interiors shop W.A. Green in Shoreditch, ‘the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought, but with furniture it’s worth it’.
Through stained-glass double doors is the Roundhouse-designed kitchen, glossy white units standing out against petrol blue walls, a shade Anderson copied from Yves Saint Laurent’s Majorelle Garden in Marrakech. A large Tom Dixon copper globe pendant light hangs from the ceiling, while walls are plastered with ‘a real hodgepodge’ of pictures: posters, children’s drawings, old photographs, street art and the odd cartoon.
Double doors lead out on to the decked, west-facing garden, where she cultivates oleander, lavender and herbs in large tubs against a bamboo hedge. Indoors again and Anderson takes me up a flight of black-carpeted stairs to the spare room which, she tells me, she painted top to toe in Farrow & Ball’s London Clay — a dark, earthy brown — just before she opened her shop.
‘Dopamine for the home’ is how she is branding her feel-good lifestyle store, which has just opened on Charlotte Road. Psychedelic-patterned silk cushions jostle for space beside buckets of faux flowers, paintings transformed into wall hangings vie for attention with original street art, while kitsch ceramics share shelf-space with bespoke studio pottery.
Anderson makes a point of championing individual makers, and displaying unknowns next to big names as a way to promote them. Everything is set against a vibrant backdrop of pink and green walls (paints are Little Greene’s Anita pink and a made-to-order emerald green, while the noisy floral wallpaper is by Silken Favours). Sure enough, the feel-good factor kicks in the minute you walk through the door, as celebrity clients such as Kit Harington, Ed Westwick and model Lily Jean Bridger — and friends Cedric Christie, Gavin Turk and actor James Joyce — have doubtless already experienced.
She had the idea for the shop after failing to find the perfect present for her best friend’s 50th birthday in London. ‘I bought a Cire Trudon candle from The Conran Shop in the end, but the seed of the idea was planted,’ says Anderson, who decided to go for it after a holiday in California. ‘I fell in love with the carefree and breezy aesthetic over there, especially the way they celebrate craft without everything having to be perfect — so I decided to do the same here.’
She took over the former men’s tailor’s in February and has looked on as new stores and pop-ups open every other week. ‘There’s a real appetite for interiors shops because no one can afford to move. Young people especially want to invigorate their homes and we’re presenting a quick and easy fix here.’ Named after her maternal grandfather, who ran a string of greengrocers in East Sussex after the Second World War, it’s slap-bang in the middle of the design-rich Shoreditch Triangle, with neighbours including London College of Fashion and hip shops such as Labour and Wait, SCP, Monologue, Do Shop and House of Hackney.
Anderson left school — ‘a very ordinary comp in Seaford, East Sussex’ — after her A-levels and went straight to work, first in children’s educational publishing and then branding and advertising, where she continued to work, taking one career break, until last October. ‘I felt excited but also bloody terrified. It was just me at the kitchen table thinking, “Crikey, how do you write a business plan?” I’d always worked with other people, so the terror was extraordinary.’
Setting up her first business at the age of 46 has meant that she no longer has the ‘bouncy naivety’ someone younger might have. ‘And I’ve got enough worldly wise experience to know that if something doesn’t seem right, then it probably isn’t.’ She’s learning, too. ‘It took me three days before I could look a customer in the eye.
I was so terrified of that whole transaction,’ she confesses, ‘but now I love it.’ She funded the business herself, with help from her husband, Gavin, who is a co-founder of the advertising agency ThirtyThree. ‘He said, “Come on, just do it, I’ll support you.” He’s been amazing.’
Crucial to Anderson’s decision to ring the changes was the loss of their son, Sonny, who died from lymphoma six years ago. Diagnosed while the family, including their daughter, Ruby (now 15), were on holiday in Italy, nine-year-old Sonny — ‘a massive Arsenal fan and just a really cool little kid’ — spent the next two years in Great Ormond Street Hospital.
‘What I took from it is that you’ve got to keep living, you can’t just do nothing. It’s been incredibly hard. I also wanted to do it for Ruby, for her to know that, having had a mum at home for so long, women do work and do make a difference and do keep going. In fact, doing the shop feels so great and positive,’ she says earnestly. ‘And, oh my God, I’m so over dark colours and black carpet,’ she says, wincing. ‘But I guess it took painting the shop pink to make me realise that. Now I want to paint the whole house pink, too.’
