Everything in the studio is exactly as Suzy would have it, and it is, as she says, intensely personal. ‘With homes, you design them for everybody in your family, where the studio is in many ways the most indulgent space you can have.’ Even on a normal day, she arrives there around 10am and stays until 7pm or 8pm, rarely inviting people in. ‘I’ve always kept a very strong demarcation between home life and studio life,’ she says. ‘Otherwise, as a mother you would never really get anything done. When my youngest was about seven,’ she laughs, ‘I took him into the studio one day and he looked at me and said, “Oh, so this is where you come to get away from us.” I was like, “no, no, no, darling. Not at all. Where did you get that idea?!”’
Elliot Sheppard
Elliot Sheppard
The home where she raised her family, meanwhile, is a classic west London white stucco terraced house a 15-minute walk away. ‘I came from a very different background to this,’ she says of her upbringing in London’s East End, ‘but when I was a kid I used to come and buy my school uniforms at Peter Jones in Chelsea, and in my child’s mind this was the ideal place to live. I found these white houses very magical, and I always wanted to grow up and live in one.’ When she finally did buy one with her husband, she remembers that ‘it felt like a manifestation.’
