First the the kitchen. Brace yourself because there are two. Both are startling: startlingly beautiful, yes, but also just plain startling. Each has a sink and work surfaces - a giant slab of untreated zinc in one, a long bench of stainless steel in the other, and there are cookers, barely detectable, but there all the same, so, yes: kitchens. But where is all the stuff? Where are the pots and pans and chopping boards? This house in north London belongs to Britain’s most loved food writer. Where is the food?
‘Cake?’ asks Nigel Slater almost on cue, and out of nowhere appears a freshly baked apple-and-ginger cake that we eat sitting at a kitchen table made from a slab of 2,000-year-old bog oak. With the cake comes green tea from Mount Fuji (via Timothy d’Offay’s Postcard Teas), which Slater spoons out of a cylindrical tea caddy, one of a collection, all handmade in Kyoto from tin and brass and copper: jewel boxes really. He has a little village of them, arranged on a large shelf in a deep built-in cupboard that also houses, on separate shelves, ceramic bowls and plates and mugs by potters and ceramists including Steve Harrison, Florian Gadsby, Rupert Spira, Richard Batterham, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie. It is a cupboard of dreams.
Slater uses this basement kitchen for himself. It’s where he cooks and eats when he’s not working. Work cooking takes place upstairs in a long gallery kitchen designed by John Pawson. So, there is food. And evidence of cooking, if you open doors and drawers, but what is more present and more striking is a seeming absence of stuff, or at least the necessary stuff that fills most of our homes. There are no coats in Slater’s hall-way, instead a fireplace; no computer in he study, rather notebooks and ink pens; no dresser in the kitchen, instead an installation of 279 pots - Tea, Fire, Smoke - by Edmund de Waal. Slater has long been collector of the artist’s work, which he first saw in 1998 at Maureen Doherty’s gallery and shop, Egg. ‘I knew immediately,’ Slater says about that first, seminal sighting. ‘The work just resounded with me.’
The De Waal piece would be enough, in terms of living with treasures. You see it and sigh. But no, upstairs a floor, in the study where Slater writes, sitting at an elm desk he spotted in a second-hand shop in Tokyo, are two tiny and exquisite Gerhard Richters, as well as a pair of 17th-century Flemish portraits by Jan van Ravesteyn. (‘It was only once I got them home’, Slater recalls, ‘that I realised I’d bought my mum and dad.’) Upstairs again, in the drawing room, hum two Richard Serras, a work on paper by Kazuo Shiraga, several Howard Hogkins, a Rachel Whiteread Medicine Cabinet, a collection of hand-raised tea bowls by Ryoji Koie and, on a bowed wooden table (‘just an old second-hand one’), a Jennifer Lee pot. In his bathroom is a Nan Goldin photograph; another hangs in his bedroom.
But look anywhere in this house - this perfect, beautiful house (late Georgian, built by Thomas Cubitt, the best in its quiet terrace in Highbury) - and you have to blink twice. Before Slater took it over in 2000 it had, appropriately enough, served as an art gallery (as well as a hospice and a slum). But for all that it’s full of museum-worthy pieces, what Slater has created is a home - a comfortable one too - rather than a showpiece. It’s a place for someone who lives and works and writes and cooks and gardens (the garden, designed by Dan Pearson, is as beautiful as you might imagine), but chooses to do so in an impeccable environment surrounded by treasured objects.
Slater also cleans. ‘It gives me a break from writing,’ he explains. ‘How else do you stop doing something which otherwise is never done?’ He laughs. He’s right, of course, but many writers employ a cleaner for a few hours a week. I think another reason he does his own scrubbing and dusting is because, as well as being the house’s owner and curator, he is also its housekeeper. He has a relationship with it, and it’s a working one, constantly evolving. He wrote in every room before deciding where to put his study, and slept in several before claiming a bedroom. He waited for ages, happy with his John Pawson kitchen, before tackling the basement, and it was only when he took down panels of chipboard and discovered two enormous fireplaces that he thought: ah yes, a kitchen; a different one, with a different feel, for a different purpose. And thus two kitchens make perfect sense.
He takes a similar approach with paint and colour. ‘It was a headache to get right,’ he reports about the colours he’s chosen, which include an inky blue for his dressing room, a black bathroom and bedroom, and a warm tobacco colour - Edward Bulmer’s ‘Trumpington’ - for a guest room. The rest of the house is a range of carefully nuanced neutrals. How did he figure it all out? ‘I started by painting the whole house white,’ he says, ‘and then went at it bit by bit. I made a lot of mistakes. I love paint, but its texture is as important to me as its colour.’ The deeply matt shades that run throughout the house are mostly by Bulmer or Atelier Ellis. We repaint the whole house every five to seven years or so,’ Slater adds cheerfully.
Edward Bulmer and Cassandra Ellis are important to Slater in terms of his aesthetic. So was Maureen Doherty, and so is the perfumer Lyn Harris (the right scent of the right hand soap in the right bottle is crucial to him), and so is Rose Uniacke. ‘I’ve soaked up so much knowledge from these people,’ he says. ‘It was Rose who taught me that you don’t need 15 things on a mantelpiece. You don’t even need five. Just one. So it can sing. There’s a huge peace about her work, which I love. There’s a grandness too, but it’s quite humble; quite simple. Also,’ he adds, ‘she is great with fabrics.’ But for all the Uniacke furniture in the house, the beautiful paint, the large collection of De Waals, this is Slater’s place, all of a piece, put together by him, ‘inch by inch’, over many years.
Certainly, his careful – flawless, in fact – yet gutsy taste (the blinds are made of horsehair; cushions from old grain sacks) didn’t come from his upbringing. You’ll know this if you’ve read Toast, his memoir about growing up in the suburbs of Wolverhampton and the Worcestershire countryside. Taste and appearances were hugely important to the Slaters, but in an old-fashioned, typically English way: a set of often random standards that served to obfuscate anything potentially tricky: feelings, for example. Slater’s mother died when he was nine years old; her illness had never been spoken of. His father’s temper was unpredictable and frightening. His stepmother, initially hired as a cleaner, cooked and cleaned obsessively, but used both activities as tools - and often weapons - to exert control over her stepson.
No wonder he has created a home without any hint of chaos. Everything has its place in this house - a whole room just for storing bowls and plates, for example, which he uses both in real life and as props for the photographs in his many books as well as his weekly Observer column. Not that anything is simply a prop here, even if every single thing cries out to be photographed. Nigel Slater is an avid collector - of ceramics, art, tea caddies even, and yet his house has a spartan feel. There is no clutter. Everywhere there is space and the space feels - and looks - exactly right.
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