Inside Lou Teasdale's Hackney home: how the influencer transformed her house from 'scary' fixer-upper to Insta-ready retreat

When influencer Lou Teasdale, 37, decided to take a step up the property ladder, she wanted to find a fixer-upper that she could truly make her own.

During Hackney’s 2015 property boom, when Teasdale says she couldn’t even get a viewing to see a lot of houses that came up for sale, the house had been sitting on the market for a while, owned by an elderly couple who had decked it out with pink wallpaper and carpet, electric fires, UPVC windows and a pebbledash façade.

“I think it looked quite scary to a lot of people,” says Teasdale. “It needed completely stripping to the bones and starting again, but it’s south-facing and it’s got a good flow because it’s all on one level, unlike a lot of terraces in east London.” So, she bought it for £825,000.

Crucially, despite the decorative discord, the couple had also looked after the house well so Teasdale was able to move in with her daughter, Lux, now nine, while she planned a total gutting and renovation.

After six months the pair decamped to her twin sister’s spare bedroom while builders did the major structural work, from taking the back and roof off, adding a double loft conversion and a side return and changing the floor plan, getting everything to a plaster finish before moving back in.

“Then I was so skint we lived here for another year like that because I needed to save up. There are pictures of that Christmas where there’s just a bare concrete floor in here, we had the island but nothing else. But I didn’t want to do it cheap and do it again,” says Teasdale.

Decorating was a gradual process, completed piecemeal over the past four years, with the essentials — one bathroom and the kitchen — finished first and the final touches only added during the first lockdown.

The kitchen is the heart of the house and functions as the main family room, as well as an entertaining space. It was bought from Wren, with the functional units grouped at the back of the room, the dining table and chairs on one side and a lounge area with television and sofa on the other side.

“I found choosing the kitchen so stressful because I was so cash skint at the time I needed to put it on finance but I wanted it to do the house justice so it needed to be a bit more special than an Ikea one. A lot of people comment on it because it looks really expensive.

"Often with big decisions like that you don’t love it enough when it finally arrives but I still really love it,” says Teasdale.

She got the custom-made look thanks to spending a bit more on finishing touches — the equivalent of adding a designer handbag to a high street outfit. Teasdale splashed out on black marble tiles lining the back wall and on the textured paint called Marrakech Walls for the “not just a white wall” effect. All the fittings are in the same brass, which ties the décor scheme together.

“I do have a lot of cream furniture, dining chairs that aren’t really for eating on,” she jokes. “I’m slightly turning into one of those mums who’ll cover the chair before sitting a kid on it. They’re just really nice chairs!”

The kitchen opens directly out through Crittall-style glass doors into the garden, which, luckily, was completed last summer and so was ready to use throughout our sunny first lockdown.

“It’s our favourite room. I wanted it a bit Moroccan-style with all decking and tiles rather than grass so I could just jet wash it and it would be ready to go.”

Teasdale’s ex-boyfriend built a double bed out of scaffolding planks so they could recreate the joy of lounging at Shoreditch House. “We’d get the paddling pool out and pretend we were in Ibiza.”

The main bedroom suite was inspired by the many hotel rooms that Teasdale stayed in in her former life on tour as hair and make-up stylist for One Direction, the job she credited with giving her “the ability to buy my own house,” in an Instagram post to mark their tenth anniversary.

Plug sockets and lamps are thoughtfully positioned, and there’s a separate dressing room and en suite bathroom, a big comfy bed and a television — “everything you need to lie there all day and watch Netflix if you want.”

The exposed brick in the bedroom was uncovered by Teasdale’s builder, who owns the achingly trendy east London Blok gyms brand, which is as popular for its hipster ex-industrial décor style as for its boutique fitness classes.

Another bedroom has paint splashes on the wood floorboards from when Teasdale’s brother-in-law, the painter Tomo Campbell, was using it as his studio. Several of his paintings hang around the house, including a large one above the dining table.

“They’re not mine, he allows me to hang them because I have the space and it’s quite nice for him to photograph them here because the light’s good. When he sells them a lot of people aren’t ready to collect them so they’ll leave them for like a year. They’re really nice decorative paintings, they really make a room.”

Other wall art in the house is an eclectic mix, from a jigsaw of a YSL advert of three women in tights, completed during lockdown and framed, to the photographs from old Indian albums from South Africa blown up and printed on canvas.

Lux’s room is perhaps the coolest nine-year-old’s bedroom in London. One Direction would make their platinum discs out to her because she toured with Teasdale and the band as a baby and several of these are now hanging in her bedroom. Photographer Misan Harriman snapped a picture of Lux with her dad at a BLM protest this summer and she now has a blown-up print of the photo on her wall too.

With five bedrooms at her disposal, Teasdale often has friends living with her in times of turmoil. “We call this house a rehab,” she says. “People come to when they’ve broken up with their boyfriends. I don’t drink so it’s where people come when they want to chill, we’ll do a juice diet and facemasks and a lot of talking. It’s very wholesome, we’ve been party girls for years so it’s a nice retreat house.”

Having spent £250,000 on the renovations and put the finishing touches to the house just this year during lockdown, Teasdale’s got the renovating bug and is now selling up through The Modern House with an asking price of £1,395,000, a healthy profit if she gets it.

“I’ve definitely made money on property,” she says. She bought her first home, a one-bedroom flat in Holloway, for £150,000 with her sister when they were both 25. They lived there together, Teasdale in the living room, her sister in the bedroom, until she bought her sister out a few years down the line.

“I’d seen Sarah Beeny saying you need to do everything yourself at least once so I did it all, the tiling, I put the kitchen in. It means that now when I work with builders I know what I’m talking about.”

Her next project will be “smaller, on a better road and more design led, probably working with an architect. It’s definitely somewhere I can channel my creativity.”