Inner peace: from clutter to calm at a house in southeast London

I hadn’t expected my interview with Ellie Gibson to open with a discussion about spice jars. Or to be precise: alphabetically organised ones. The comedian is the co-founder – along with Helen Thorn – of Scummy Mummies: a podcast dedicated, as she puts it, to the “hard, messy, funny… and humiliating” realities of family life.

Her southeast London home reveals a rather different side. One of her guilty pleasures, it seems, is filing cardamom before cumin, or fenugreek after fennel, in a specially made drawer.

Designer orderliness saturates the rest of Gibson’s house, with its murals, wide windows and jaunty modernist-look lighting. The former games journalist shares the Edwardian terrace with her husband and two children. But the place has not always been so decorous. When her children were young, the three-storey home was awash with toys and the paraphernalia of Gibson’s stage shows: gold catsuits and Victorian bearded-lady costume, squashed into plastic storage. The kitchen drawers didn’t close properly; the lighting was murky. But then their fortunes changed. The podcast began to attract revenue. Eventually, they had enough money to do up the house.

The urge to streamline her surroundings had stolen up on Gibson. She found herself drawn to decluttering shows, with their promise of control. She read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up three times. And here is another confession: “I really like folding my pants into sushi rolls and arranging them by colour. I find it soothing.”

Redesigning a house is another matter so designer Nicki Bamford-Bowes, a fellow mother at school, stepped in. “It was like having a therapist. I’d have doubts about something and WhatsApp her at an inconvenient moment.” Bamford-Bowes would usually advise that she slept on it. “Her phrase was: ‘You have to like it, because you have to live with it.’ Then I’d go with her opinion, because she has better taste than me.”

It was Bamford-Bowes who suggested they widen the arch that connects the living space to the kitchen. Gibson had ideas for its decoration partly inspired by her time spent in Japan as a journalist. “My husband says I’d turn my house in to a Japanese theme park if I could. But what’s wrong with that? Everything there is exquisite, down to the toilet handles.”

Bamford-Bowes also designed the floor-to-ceiling storage with its “wibbly” dark wooden surfaces; a nod to traditional Japanese architecture, as is the matt black fridge. The first one that arrived was shiny – Gibson caused “massive consternation” by sending it back. “It was a lot of money. I wanted it to be right and permanent.” On Sundays, the kitchen is where you will find her cooking while listening to Enya or other suitably “diddly-diddly” tracks. She stresses that she does not entertain. “That makes me sound like Margo in The Good Life. But I do like having friends round. Eating lots. And drinking.”

In its previous iteration the house was all grey – as was much of her wardrobe. “I found it a contrast to the all the plastic toys.” With all the tact required of her profession, Bamford-Bowes coaxed Gibson out of her chromophobia to try different colours. The melting tones of the wallpaper – like a misty landscape – upstairs in the bedroom are a refuge from being on tour. “I want to come home and feel cocooned.” There is another reference to Japan in the wave-patterned wallpaper of her sons’ bedroom, where the bunk beds were made to fit.

Even Gibson’s previously banned pink manages to surface in the sitting room furniture. Here, the foliage-adorned mural in the sitting room is, in fact, another wallpaper, made to order. The funds didn’t stretch to the entire room so they painted the rest a matching colour. “No one notices.”

The room was also the setting for a historic event. Gibson has been in the Guinness World Book of Records three times (once for doing a standup gig at the base of Everest, the highest location on record). Last year, she set herself another fundraising challenge: to break a world record by playing Power Wash simulator (yes, a car-cleaning game) nonstop for almost 24 hours. She was doing this when the joiner arrived to move some shelves. He carried on. “He knows it’s what I do.”

The vintage-looking light switches dotted around the house were another indulgence. “Every time I switch that toggle I feel as if I’m on the Orient Express in 1930 – and the murderer has just been revealed.” They probably cost more than the highstreet chest of drawers or the designer-look lights. But, like that spice drawer, “they bring great joy”.