A photographer and furniture designer frame their ideal home

Lottie Hampson is sitting on the edge of the double bed she shares with her partner, the furniture and interior designer Freddy Tuppen, appraising her camera collection. Crammed inside a low cabinet, there are vintage Pentaxes, a Hasselblad, some old Canons. “I’m not really a gear person,” says the photographer. “I’m quite scrappy – my cameras get bashed around. But that’s the theme of my life. I really use things properly.”

His back against the wall, legs stretched out on the floorboards, Tuppen laughs. “This thing about aged, worn objects is a shared trait,” he admits. Their home – a flat extending over the top two floors of a Victorian house in Brixton – is proof. Though Tuppen only bought it in 2016, with Hampson moving in six years later, it feels as though the couple have been living here for decades.

That is partly down to the quantity, and quality, of the items they have surrounded themselves with. But it’s also down to Tuppen’s peculiar approach to interior design, which often involves unearthing a building’s previous lives. The same is true here. “There was this green everywhere,” he says, pointing to a door in the guest bedroom bearing blotchy remnants of paint. “With this kind of place, you’ve got to respond to what the building is, not shoehorn a whole different style on to it.” As we speak, a train goes past on the track outside the window. “The whole house shakes when it goes by,” he adds. “The building next door was bombed during the war, so when they rebuilt it, everything stayed a bit wonky.”

Picking up another heirloom from the bookshelves – a wooden block painted by his mother – Tuppen describes how she, too, shaped his love for the unpolished. A former occupational therapist, his mother dedicated much of her life to raising him and his three brothers. Because the family moved around England a lot, she would always be tasked with renovating the doer-uppers they ended up in. “I spent a lot of my childhood in building sites. I love how the homes she created for us felt safe and secure, but also inspiring,” he says. “My enjoyment of a house in flux – which smells of plaster, where the floorboards haven’t got carpets on – comes from that.”

The flat is also home to the couple’s studio, a shared room downstairs where two desks jostle for space. (Thankfully, they seldom need to use this space at the same time, as Tuppen makes his larger pieces of furniture in a workshop in north London or in Devon, while Hampson often uses a local darkroom and printing workshop, or is out on shoots.) Their work, however, can be seen everywhere. Tuppen’s squarish stools are dotted around, and the sofa is also his custom design (created because the one he had originally bought couldn’t fit up the stairs). Meanwhile, Hampson’s ethereal black-and-white etchings of forest scenes hang in the landing and the living room, and her shell-like ceramic bowls sit in the guest room.

Though the aesthetics of their work may seem distinct – his is more minimalist and geometric; hers is textured and rich in minute details – they share a fundamental essence: a fascination with materials and the process of making. The daughter of a painter, Hampson grew up in north London, but she was highly influenced by her Welsh grandmother, also an artist, whose inherited belongings (including hand-embroidered blankets and beaten-up chairs) also populate the flat. “She was so stylish,” Hampson says. “She used to teach art classes and I went every week.” A painterly vein carries through into Hampson’s photography. “A lot of my work is shot on film, printed out, rescanned,” she says, looking at her etching of woods in San Francisco (the first gift she gave Tuppen as an “art swap” after they met). “There’s a lot of room for accidents, which is part of the beauty.”

The house has also provided space for creative experimentation. “It’s been a test bed for my making skills,” says Tuppen, as Hampson cuts into a lemon curd, candied ginger and kumquat cake (she is also a keen baker). Though he studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, where he now teaches, Tuppen initially pursued a career in art and has always enjoyed using his hands. In the bathroom he clad the walls in square, white tiles and little else; in the kitchen he stripped the floors, re-laid the original boards and built open cabinets that keep their selection of glassware, ceramics and pans on full display.

Brixton may not be London’s quietest neighbourhood, but inside the house the noise is almost imperceptible. The kitchen window looks out on to a park that brings a sense of greenery even to this grey winter’s day. “Having the trees outside, the colour in the rooms changes massively. In spring the rooms just glow green,” Tuppen says. Though they toyed with the idea of a countryside patch (even living for a month in Dorset), they eventually opted to stay in the city. “This flat is really central to that decision,” Hampson says. “I have found such contentedness here.”

Much of that is down to the community of friends and family who live in town and often gather around the long table Tuppen designed for the kitchen. “There have been a lot of parties in this flat,” Tuppen says. “Mostly lunches and dinners, but occasionally it’s ‘Come back to ours after the pub’ and proper move-tables-out-of-the way house parties.”

You can feel the presence of all those people in many of the items that deck out this space – vases, frames, pebbles – made, found or gifted by friends along the way. Perhaps that’s why, even if Tuppen says they are “at capacity” and operating a strict “one in, one out policy” (a principle challenged by a recent, fruitful trip to Mexico), the idea of letting any of it go is agonising. “I remember asking Lottie what would happen if we sold everything – not just the flat, but all the things in it,” he says. Even now, Hampson is quick to rebuke. “I was immediately, like, no, I wouldn’t be able to. I don’t even want to entertain the idea.”