Bold, playful and a bit naughty, cult jewellery by Tatty Devine became a staple item worn by fashionistas on the streets of east London in the late 1990s.
Art students Harriet Vine and Rosie Wolfenden went from selling their earrings, bracelets and necklaces — laser cut from colourful Perspex — on a market stall to selling into Harvey Nichols and Whistles and appearing in Vogue.
Bespoke pieces have been commissioned by Madonna and Lily Allen and worn by Björk and Beth Ditto over the years.
Their collaborations are still going strong: Tatty Devine is the official jewellery brand for Pulp’s 2025 You Deserve More tour and there is a new exclusive collection to accompany artist Grayson Perry’s Delusions of Grandeur exhibition at The Wallace Collection.
Harriet Vine’s latest project is back on the streets of east London. The mother-of-one has just completed a remarkable transformation of a dilapidated Victorian terraced house in which she took a hammer to her own walls, taught herself how to plaster and strained her paint through tights.
Living in Victoria Park with her now 17-year-old daughter and her two lodgers, Vine, 48, had always wanted her own “Victorian dolls’ house”. And so, three years ago she went on the hunt in nearby Clapton.
“It was an absolute bun fight to buy a house in this area. I was coming up against young couples with a lot of financial support from their parents who were offering over asking price each time. I was pushing my budget as far as I could, on my own, with no safety net,” Vine says.
Then one morning the estate agent sent her to see the wrong property, which happened to be on sale but not advertised on the market. A fellow artist opened the door and they bonded over a mutual love of artist, film-maker, poet and writer Jean Cocteau.
It was a tall thin house but Vine wanted a loft to convert for her daughter and a garden, which are not easy to find in the area. “I wanted to go all boots in and overhaul an entire property top to bottom,” she says.
As soon as she got home, she wrote the ultimate pleading letter to the vendor. “I didn’t just write a begging letter,” Vine explains. “I imitated Jean Cocteau’s handwriting and drew a sketch in his style too.”
It worked and she took on the complicated property which consisted of two separate flats and three mortgages: two leaseholder mortgages for the connected ground floor and first floor flats and a freeholder mortgage for the whole house.
‘It was a trauma of a space’
Despite the hot east London market in 2022, Vine had offered under asking price every time, knowing she needed to hold back £50,000 for a loft conversion.
“This was the only part of the whole project I couldn’t do myself and was really important to carve out a living space for my daughter,” she says.
That expenditure meant everything else needed to be done on a shoestring and by Vine and her boyfriend (an artist) in the evenings and at the weekends over a two-year stretch.
The vendors (she believes) thought the buyer would let the flats out separately and as they were living upstairs they gave the ground floor flat a quick refresh to help the sale after tenants had left.
“Sadly, cowboys had been in,” says Vine. “The kitchen cupboards just lifted off the walls, barely held on, I didn’t even need a screwdriver. The newly fitted downstairs shower was already leaking, and the corridor was smashed up where they had tried to force bike brackets on the walls and failed, leaving huge gouges along the walls,” she continues.
The skirting boards were planks of wood; the kitchen consisted of stainless-steel units with a plastic door leading to a backyard which had become a dumping ground. “It was a trauma of a space,” Vine adds.
At both a surface level (the skinny bedroom was decorated in bright turquoise and gold) and underneath (fake slate tiles on the kitchen floor had been laid on top of more tiles) the place needed gutting.
Transformation on a shoestring
The long corridor runs from the front door to the bathroom at the back. Also squeezed into the floorplan was a narrow kitchen, a skinny bedroom and a small front room.
Vine took a hammer to the wall under the stairs. The space which had been a coal haul had been bricked up leaving it still full of coal. This was to be the new shower room.
An actual plumber came in and fitted a drain and then she “watched a thousand YouTube videos” teaching herself how to plumb in a bathroom.
Wielding the hammer again, she knocked down internal walls to the back of the house to expand the kitchen.
The front room became a living room-bedroom with a sofa bed to free up more space.
People are scared of colour but my business is built on it. I didn’t want to decorate it for the next person who lives here — it’s for us
Vine also smashed old windows and doors out, having had a quick lesson from a builder on how to repoint bricks, to add frames she had acquired from the tip or the flea market — and replaced the frosted glass too.
She could not afford to rebuild the old box extension and was quoted £7,000 to render it. So, Vine borrowed a cement mixer, bought 36 bags of sand, and learnt how to render it herself.
“It’s like making a cake, you just need to approach it with confidence,” she says. Vine then painted it in a deep salmon pink (Phoenix Feather by Johnstone’s) with baby pink back and side doors.
Sitting with colour
The ground floor flat went from a tatty white box to a celebration of colour, with the living room-bedroom entirely in yellow (Chinese Emperor by Paper & Paint), the corridor in coral and a blue teal three quarters of the way up the panelling she added to the walls of the kitchen.
“I always knew I wanted a yellow room, it’s happy and fun and I often wear it head to toe. People are scared of colour but my business is built on it and I didn’t want to decorate it for the next person who lives here — it’s for us,” she says.
To get her walls glassy smooth Vine used a sanding machine and sieved the paint through brand new tights (a trick learnt from her mother) to remove any bits.
“Paints are incredibly expensive and people throw out unopened tins of top brands so I managed to get a lot of paint from the tip, and I didn’t waste a drop,” she says. Vine also sat with the paints dabbed onto her walls for days to make sure she had the right shades.
Much of the artwork is from her dad’s garage (he was part of the construction team that built the Royal Mint, Guys Hospital and Mansion House) as well as an old mantelpiece that had been ripped out on one of his jobs and is now in the yellow living room.
The fire surround she picked up from the side of the road when driving through Greenwich and she turned tables from an exhibition into shelving.
The ground floor flat is now finished, Vine’s daughter lives in the loft space and the upper flat is a work in progress. It is another opportunity to curate interiors that represent exactly who she is.
Her work ethic is there in every neatly cut and laid quarry tile; her parents’ make do and mend ethos shines through; and her daughter’s love of cooking — as evidenced by the food-based signage and the love that has been poured into the kitchen.
