HOUSE TOUR: A tiled jewel box of an apartment

HOUSE TOUR: A tiled jewel box of an apartment

This fabulous flat belongs to the best-selling novelist Melanie Cantor, formerly a celebrity agent and publicist, who has renovated 21 homes and swears she will never give this one up

Kate Watson-Smyth

Oct 21, 2026

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Melanie Cantor moves house like most of us change clothes. If she gets bored of the decor she sells up and starts a new project. On the day we meet she’s pondering selling her house in Dorset - and when I suggest she could redecorate instead, she looks at me like the idea has simply never occurred to her.

“I actually could, couldn’t I?” she muses, but swears in the same breath that she’s never moving from this London flat - a tiny jewel box of colour and detail that in anyone else’s hands would look like a cluttered mess, but under her expertise is an Aladdin’s cave of objects where you just know that every piece has a story to tell.

And that, it has to be said, is what makes for the best interiors. Of course colour and pattern and layout are important, but it’s a sense of the person that has brought everything together in once space that brings a room to life

Vintage cinema chairs have been reupholstered in

Emma Shipley

fabric

Melanie invited me to visit after reading about

my recent takeover of the Italian mosaic company

Bisazza’s showroom

for the London Design Festival

. She messaged to say that her flat had been tiled in every room, and sent me a couple of pictures. So when I met her at my readers’ event (at Bisazza) we immediately fixed a date to visit.

The ceiling is painted in Rhubarb by

Neptune

The one-bedroom apartment, which sits in an Art Deco mansion block in north London, is indeed full of tiles: they’re on the sitting room walls in panels, the kitchen ceiling, the hall walls - and all the doors are either mirrored or tiled or both.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. This is where you really learn how to make the most of your own space so that it inspires, supports and nourishes your soul. And all homes should do that. Come and join us - and in addition to an extra weekly post - you also gain access to my monthly Drop-in Design Clinic on Zoom where you can bring me your decorating dilemmas and we will chat them through.

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