For Filippa Knutsson, co-founder of Swedish fashion brand Filippa K, a move to a Georgian house in Barnsbury, north London, came with a sense of homecoming. Although she was born in Sweden, she moved to London aged three with her mother and spent her formative years in the capital, before returning to Stockholm aged 21 and eventually moving to Paris almost three decades later. She returned to London in 2015, buying a listed terrace house that was just the right size – small enough to feel cosy, but large enough to accommodate her three grown up children when they visited. As it comes to the market, Filippa tells us about how she created a relaxing sanctuary and incorporated contemporary elements into her listed Georgian house.

“It’s difficult for me to explain why I moved back to London four years ago, because there is not one defining reason. I’d been living in Paris for three years with my partner Thomas. We’ve known each other since we were teenagers, but met again later in our lives and rekindled our relationship 17 years ago. We have five children between us – I’ve got three and Thomas has two.

“The move was partly because my children’s education was centred here and also a strange kind of need to get back to my roots. My mother moved from Stockholm to London when I was three, so I ended up growing up in Chelsea – it was the swinging Sixties and there was that whole London scene with the Rolling Stones and King’s Road. My move back to the capital was quite sudden and intuitive, but turned out to be very meaningful and rewarding. Thomas who lives between Corsica and Paris, stayed on in France and our relationship wasn’t really affected by it, because we are so used to living in different countries and travel to each other often.

“At first, I was looking for an apartment, because I thought I’d just keep it simple. Paris and Stockholm, where I lived for 26 years, are both apartment cities really. I’d sort of lost track of London, but my oldest friend was living in Islington, so I honed in on that area of north London. There was a charm about it, which reminded me of Chelsea in the Sixties and early Seventies. When I started looking, I was just so seduced by the fact you could live in a house with a garden that I abandoned the idea of a flat.

“I fell for Barnsbury – it’s a Conservation Area and full of beautiful intact Georgian houses, with big windows. I looked at five different, but very similar, houses and then visited this one on a lovely sunny day. I walked in and just thought “This is it”. It was the perfect size. I didn’t want something that I’d feel lonely in when my children weren’t around.

“I really liked the townhouse charm, with just one room on each floor. It was so different from the way I had been living for many years. I really needed a home where I could go to recharge and relax.

“People probably think I live in quite a minimal and harsh house, because the clothes I create through Filippa K can be very simple. Although I do have a very contemporary taste, I fell for the fact that this house was a period building and, like with the clothes I design, I wanted to keep warmth and humanity in it, while also eliminating any clutter. When I started Filippa K in 1993, there was a whole minimal movement where you wanted to scale everything back and live purely. It was a sustainable idea, although we didn’t use that word then. I suppose that what you wear and what you live in express the same kind of values.

“The house is a listed building in a Conservation Area, so there’s not a lot of changes I could actually make. I couldn’t add a big extension at the back, as it was completely protected. I loved the challenge of being able to create a contemporary lifestyle within a historical building – it was about finding solutions, without making any major changes to the fabric of the house. I strived to make things simple and authentic, using genuine, quality materials, such as oak for the floors, handmade Moroccan tiles for the kitchen and bathrooms and richly pigmented paint throughout.

“I called on the skills of architect Angus Shepherd of Powell Tuck, and really appreciated working with him so collaboratively. He created contemporary and functional solutions with great attention to detail. He respected the charm and also improved the quality of life in the house. He also welcomed my specific wishes for certain materials and even hardware – all the knobs and handles came from Sweden.

“The living area on the first floor would have been two rooms at the start, but the former owner knocked them through. As I work from home, I decided to make part of this room into a workplace. I can look out of those big windows and see the trees from my desk, or if I sit on the other side, I can look out onto the garden.

“I love that I can lie on my bed and look out onto the trees in Barnsbury Square. I’m the sort of person that needs to relax a lot and meditate on my own in order to be creative.

“So many lovely houses around Barnsbury put the kitchen in the basement and basically live in that room with sofas, TVs and everything else. I decided instead to put the kitchen on the ground floor where the light is good.

“There is a kind of openness and transparency to living in London – you can look into people’s houses when you’re walking down the street. It’s something you’d never see in Stockholm or Paris. At the start, I remember feeling a bit too close to the street, because you can hear people walking past through the single-glazed windows. After a while, I started really liking it, because it felt like you were never alone – like you’re in a cafe or something.

“For the garden, I asked designer Stuart Craine to create something natural yet elegant without a lawn, which would fill the long skinny space. He completely understood what I was after and the garden has been a source of joy all year round. There are concrete sleepers leading to the rear of the garden, which feels quite contemporary, but they are softened by moss and ferns growing all around them.

“The gardens in our row all converge at the back and there are lots of big trees all around. The whole sensation is that you’re far away from the city. Apart from a siren or two every now and then, it really is just birds and squirrels.

“London will always be part of my life now. It’s been very rewarding to reconnect with really old friends, friends I hadn’t seen for 30 years. Over the last year, I lived with my three grown-up children in the house and that’s very symbolic for me. It’s probably the last time in our lives where we will live together under the same roof, and there has been a great sense of family and closing a certain circle of my life.

“I’m moving to Corsica now. It’s where Thomas and I met when I was 15 and he was 19, and we bought a place together there about 14 years ago. It’s a really special island, with such a varied and mountainous landscape. I love it, and I’d rather reverse my lifestyle so that I have my base there and just keep a small apartment in the city. Thomas is an architect – he creates exclusive homes in Corsica – and over lockdown we found our dream plot of land with ancient olive trees where we can create a home from scratch. That really pushed me to leave London.”

Portrait of Filippa by Dan Smith

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