How legendary stylist Lucinda Chambers has perfected the eclectic English look at home

The former Vogue fashion director’s London house is creative, colourful and – above all – comfortable

“Someone called me the queen of cosy the other day,” says Lucinda Chambers, “and I thought it was just the best compliment.” It’s not what you might expect to hear from the former fashion director at Vogue, and one of the UK’s most legendary stylists and designers. But it is undoubtedly a very apt description: Chambers’ own home in west London, where she and her family have lived for 35 years, is creative, colourful and super-stylish, but above all, it is deeply comfortable. 
She is not interested in what she terms “ghastly good taste” – a room where everything is carefully coordinated – but loves to throw in the odd curveball, the thing that doesn’t necessarily “go”, but that shakes things up a bit. “And I would never put style over comfort,” she says. “I think if you walk into a house and you can’t fling yourself on a sofa, or you have to take your shoes off, or you can’t grab a chair and sit down and chat, then that to me is not a functioning house.” 
Chambers’ innate sense of style and her love of beautiful (yet functional) things informs her life both inside and outside of her home. Since leaving Vogue in 2017, she has co-founded the fashion label Colville, and the online shopping platform Collagerie, which she runs with her former Vogue colleague Serena Hood. The latter is an edited curation of everything the pair have seen and loved in the world of fashion, interiors, beauty and art, which encompasses both high end and high street, be it a £90 Dolce & Gabbana candle or a £15 M&S lampshade. Chambers and Hood have also begun designing their own fashion and homeware collections; their latest being a 86-piece range of bedlinen, cushions, lighting, tableware and wallpaper for John Lewis, launching on Monday. 
Chambers’ interiors aesthetic is the perfect match for a brand such as John Lewis, which wants to bring a little modern cool to its range, without departing from the classic designs on which it has built its customer base. For their collection, she and Hood delved into the John Lewis textile archive of more than 25,000 prints dating back as far as the 1850s, selecting 15 which they then gently tweaked to bring them up to date.
It’s a neat reflection of the way in which she mixes different styles in her own home – checks, stripes, florals, ikats, the works – and her belief that decorating a house is, in many ways, similar to putting together an outfit. “I think my home is a bit like myself in that it’s never one thing,” she says. “I can dress in a quite utilitarian way, but then I can dress very extravagantly, with a lot of texture going on, and I think rooms are similar.”
She has, she says, “never done a house from scratch”, but has instead decorated “out of necessity”, whenever a room has needed it. She painted her acid-yellow dining room 25 years ago (“I thought, that’s a room that people are going to be chatting in, it’s got to feel lively”), and the bold red and yellow walls in her living room are a by-product of her youngest son’s Lego phase (“I said, you pick the colours, and we’ll make it work”). Her most recent project has been her spare room, which is decorated in lilac and grey and has an entirely different, tranquil vibe: “I wanted people to feel comfortable and calm in there.”
“With homes, the nature of the house and how you use it changes over time – it’s a bit like your face and your body,” she says. “I have three sons, and that has definitely dictated the way the house has looked. At one time, the sitting room was full of Lego, the garden was dominated by a huge trampoline, one of their bedrooms was covered in graffiti. So the house does really evolve with the times that you’re going through in your life.” 
Another reason why her house is constantly evolving is that, unsurprisingly for someone who has co-founded a shopping website, Chambers is a fan of shopping herself, whether rummaging through a market on holiday, riffling through a car boot sale or combing the high street. She describes herself as acquisitive – “Ever since I was a child, wherever I go, I like to bring something back” – but adds, “I don’t think I’m very materialistic. When the boys were young, so much stuff would get broken, so I couldn’t be precious about things.” 
In a similar vein, she doesn’t keep things simply for show, but uses them, whether that’s the collection of ceramic plates on display in a plate rack on the kitchen wall where she can easily reach them, or a pretty pottery dish currently being used to store her cat’s toys. Her house is proof that the functional can be beautiful, and vice versa.
When it comes to where she finds things, “Nothing is off limits for me,” she says, “although my shopping habits have changed. When I was younger, if I loved something I would just buy it, but these days, if I’m going to buy something I’ve got to have a home for it. Having said that, I don’t entirely stick to that rule,” she admits. “I recently bought some ceramics that don’t have a home, and they’re sitting on the floor.”
What comes through most strongly in her home is her innate flair for matching colours, and the pleasure that she takes in the objects that she sees and loves. “I do take enjoyment from things,” she says. “The biggest joy for me, whether it is clothes or rooms, is that I love to decorate. Equally, when it comes to your home, it’s really important that it’s a fluid and functioning space to live in, rather than something that looks great but where there’s nowhere to sit. You need to be comfortable in a house that isn’t a showpiece.”