Z He and Alex Peffly’s townhouse is filled with secondhand Victorian chinoiserie. The look may be retro, but this London home teems with modern ideas about culture and work
In Z He and Alex Peffly’s living room there are soft-toned pagodas, parasols and misty mountaintops above a drinks cabinet worthy of an imperial outpost. “It hints at old Shanghai,” says Z. Throughout this east London home there are embroidered silk cushions scattered over daybeds, fringed lampshades and potted palms set on fussily carved side tables. The house is full of chinoiserie – the style that the Victorians and Edwardians brought back from colonial postings, grand tours and day trips to Liberty’s – which Z wants to reclaim. “In drawing rooms from Hong Kong to Hampstead, they created a very European version of the East,” says Z. “It bore some relation to reality, but it was very romanticised. It reflected the China they wanted to discover.”
Z is an architect who grew up in Guangzhou, north west of Hong Kong, and Alex is a chef from Ohio. They met as students in Chicago. They now live on Princelet Street, a Spitalfields address with plenty of its own history. The short rows of 18th-century townhouses were originally built by landlords who made a profit from the Huguenot merchants fleeing France. Smaller flats and attics were rented to less well-off silk weaving families as working and living spaces.
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