Inside Virginia White's Hampstead Heath mansion flat, filled with a lifetime of art

[light gentle music]

We used to live in a four story house in Islington,

and the children all left,

and we decided we wanted to simplify our life,

downsize the way forward.

Being in a mansion block, you feel very safe,

and you just feel you've got neighbors

immediately around you.

So it's a bit of a community really.

Very much my approach to interior design

is keeping things quite simple.

I know I've got a lot of things that inhabit the space,

which makes it busy.

So I use the same wall colors.

The color in the living room here is Timeless by Dulux.

I tend to use the same curtain treatment throughout,

off-white linen curtains by ETRO,

and that's really sort of a staple signature.

That means that the space flows.

There isn't a sort of start and finish between each zone.

My possessions are really friends,

and I love them dearly and I love rearranging them.

And so belongings to me make the home so personal.

This is one of the first pictures I bought.

It's a William Scott.

It was always my anchor piece to the rest of my collection.

So I'm very much somebody who collects modern British.

So really, the mirror is an idea

that I use a lot in my interiors.

It's sort of one of my signature pieces.

I work with somebody called Dominic Schuster,

and it's an antique hand-finished mercury glass,

and I do the split in the mirror.

So that's called the trade top table.

And then here, we've got the temple house sofa,

which is quite formal.

And above it, I've got my grandfather's picture

by Maria Casper [indistinct].

It's quite colorful for my taste.

Normally, I have much more monochrome art,

but I just needed to live with that.

I'm a huge fan of the potter

and textile artist, Rose de Borman,

and I just thought it's so bizarre

the way the colors all work.

It's a sort of hodgepodge,

but it just goes really well together.

When you've got a big space like this,

it's quite important to break it up

into sort of more cozy, smaller areas.

So we were trying to create library, dining room,

study, sitting room, all in one space.

We found this amazing old travel chest,

and I knew it would be the center of the room.

I've got a little bit of a kettle's yard medley,

so I've obviously got my Bible,

A Way of Life by Jim Ede.

I've got my collection of pottery by Seth Cardew.

I've got my Joan Depaoli sculpture of a dancer,

Anna Margaret Mellis house, which she made on mull.

I've always got a big sort of dried flower arrangement on it

'cause it sort of divides the space.

Here is a great place for me to clutter away on the walls.

I've got lots of my pictures, so I'm a big Hockney fan.

I love Brianna Casey, I love Nicholson,

which I'm so lucky to have.

Here, for the dining room,

I found this wonderful Italian refractory table.

I bought it in Lawford's,

and then I thought I need to lighten it up a bit.

And so I've got these '60s Cesca chairs by Marcel Breuer.

That's really part of my new collection,

which is called the Woven Collection.

We weave in Sudbury with a very, very old weaving house,

and it's my greatest joy at the moment.

The light is a very modern, very simple one.

Something that really contrasts

to the heaviness of a big oak table.

I thought that would be quite nice.

And then of course, lovely to have these 1960s,

very utilitarian steel shelves in the background,

which are serving a purpose.

It would be wrong to have something like a really sort of,

you know, built in timber library here.

It would just make the whole thing heavy.

Considering I've got so much stuff,

it's quite difficult not to get heavy,

but I've tried my hardest.

[gentle music]

So this is my study,

and this is a hub of operations, really.

Just gives me a little bit of privacy,

away from the very large open spaces,

but I'm still connected to it.

So it was its own space when we first bought the flat,

and then I put in what we call marble arch.

One of the things I was so excited about

is I managed to acquire this wonderful

Howard Hodgkin called Venice, Evening.

And I spent almost a year living in Venice

when I was working for the Guggenheim Museum.

And so I thought it would be wonderful to have

a view onto Venice in the evening,

and then I looked through my dining room

and I've got my English view.

Well, we were so lucky to find a flat

with such a generous bedroom.

We've never had a generous bedroom like this

with an en-suite attached to it.

The light is fabulous.

Waking up here is just utter heaven.

But generally, it's a mishmash of just personal things,

and they all sit in a very happy, eclectic way.

These were one of the first finds

or buys that I did when I first started

my apprenticeship with John Stefanidis in Chelsea.

I spent all my salary on trying to pay these two boys off,

a lovely Murano, modern '70s light,

and John McLean abstract painting,

and a complete coincidence that they work so well

with my Morris table from my collection.

[gentle music]

The bathroom again is filled with not only toiletries

but also, my little favorite collections is in there,

is a collection by Rose de Borman who is a potter.

And on the wall, I've got a lovely,

very simple drawings by Roger Hilton,

which are very minimal outline drawings of bodies,

and I think that's quite fitting in a bathroom.

I asked my friend Marianna Kennedy,

and she creates these lovely trellises,

but it means that it's a lovely light.

We are shielded from the outside world,

but we still get this lovely

natural light filtering through the trellis.

So that was a clever idea.

[light music]

I'd been working in Holland a lot,

looked at a lot of sort of golden age 17th century kitchens

and I was inspired by that,

and I thought I want to create something

which is warm and organic.

I've used an Edward Bulmer paint called Jonquil,

and I feel that it gives a really lovely

wraparound warm vibe, which means that this kitchen

is sort of habitable in times when it's not super sunny.

Kitchen is very heavy or top heavy on collecting,

because I love pottery, English pottery,

from the Leach pottery and when Winford Bridge,

so Michael Cardew, Seth Cardew, Bernard Leach is endless.

So I've got enormous amounts of jugs and pots and chargers.

I think yellow works particularly well with pink.

So that was a sort of an experiment.

So I've got my lovely [indistinct],

and it's like a sun that shines

sort of through this lovely putty pink.

So I thought that worked really nicely.

[light music]

The whole point of being a decorator or designer

and also a collector is that I very much believe

that it's my things that make the home.

And they've really sort of traveled with me

through various homes,

and they've always been a sort of dear friend

that has cropped up again.

[light gentle music]