When Simon Townsend first viewed this Victorian maisonette in South London he was wowed by the size of the rooms and the vast windows that look onto vistas of greenery. His partner, Simon Cordon, recalls, “I heard him saying, ‘Come and see this!’ but, quite typically, I was downstairs looking at storage space because I’m always more interested in the practicalities.” Townsend has an exuberant, creative personality, and is a florist with his own company, Bulbous. Cordon works for rape victim service The Havens.
With Cordon’s pragmatic personality, it’s a case of opposites attracting. Townsend and Cordon have been a couple since the early 1990s. They lived together for a while back then but reverted to separate flats, despite becoming civil partners during the intervening years. “We couldn’t live together!” says Townsend, simply. But they took the plunge again in 2015 when this irresistible home came on to the market opposite Cordon’s old flat: “We decided it was getting a bit ridiculous not to live together,” he explains.
Once they’d bought the place they got stuck in to boring practicalities, like eradicating the damp problem in the low, deep cupboard that ran along their bedroom wall. They flipped the main bathroom into an ensuite for the second bedroom by relocating its door. This spare room also works as an office and music room but with a sofa bed for easy converting – Cordon’s idea – so that they could accommodate post-party guests with minimum effort.
The kitchen is deliberately low key, so that it doesn’t dominate the adjoining living room. It runs along just one wall so it can’t be seen from the sofas. Cordon found clever ways to reduce worktop clutter – there’s no kettle or toaster, a boiling-water tap and grill do the honours instead. Meanwhile, Townsend chose a dark raspberry shade for the cabinets: “I knew I wanted some bold colour here,” he explains, “even though our kitchen designer pushed for white.”
The couple liked natural stone worktops but were advised that they’d have to treat lemon and red wine stains immediately. “We didn’t want to be hostages to our own countertops,” recalls Townsend, smiling. So Cordon put a sample slab of dark quartz through a weekend of messy testing before giving it his stamp of approval. If all this is making him sound like an uptight neat freak, it’s quite the reverse. “I’m not even tidy,” he admits.
While their approaches remain different, the years have blurred the boundaries between their tastes. Not only can they each predict exactly what the other will go for, they also have a lot of common ground when it comes to colours and materials.
They have successfully combined their stuff – Cordon’s comfy grey sofa sits perfectly with Townsend’s 1960s statement lighting and retro vases. The impressive art collection is all Townsend’s – a mix of big hitters like Rachel Whiteread and Jamie Reid, work by friends and one Picasso-like painting by the former homeowner’s brother, which they found languishing in the shed. Together, they hung all the art over one long weekend, an experience marred when the very last tiny picture to go up burst a mains water pipe. It was a setback – but this pair have come through worse together and are clearly all the stronger for it.
