A day at home with the painter Molly Gaisford
The painter Molly Gaisford has lived in the same Victorian house in south London for nineteen years, slowly turning it into the world she imagined as a child: low evening light, soft colour, everything mended rather than replaced. A chalk stream runs past the end of the garden, and the studio she works in was modelled on Virginia Woolf’s writing room. We spent a day there in June.
First light
Molly wakes between 6.30 and 7am, whether she means to or not. Downstairs first, to feed the cats. Radio 3 on. The back doors open. Coffee from the espresso machine into a very large mug, with hot oat and almond milk.
Then she goes down to the river, in pyjamas and slippers.
The River Wandle runs past the end of the garden, and it is the reason she bought the house. It is a chalk stream, so there are kingfishers, damselflies, ducklings, coots nesting. Sometimes a heron.
"I simply look at the water," she says. "Watch the way it pools and moves around objects if the level is low, see how the light hits it at that moment, listen to the birds, breathe in the morning and let my mind wander."
Ten minutes of being, she calls it. She doesn't take her phone. A cat usually follows her out.
She does not go straight into the studio, and she is honest about why. "I have to literally force myself, as I can become intimidated by the standard I've set myself." So there is a stretch of talking herself down from the ledge, as she puts it, and reminding herself to play. She is usually in there by 10am.
"I've made peace with the fact that when I do eventually get in there, I am always better for it."
The house that felt familiar
"The moment I walked through the front door it felt familiar," she says of the viewing, 19 years ago. It had not been modernised much since it was built and was last decorated some time in the late eighties. The bathroom was tiled in mustard yellow, dark green and navy. She painted over them on about day two.
The first thing you notice is the smell. She burns scented candles constantly, and a Provençal scent carries all the way through the house — bergamot, lemon, something musky and floral underneath.
What she loved was already there: the original fireplaces, the larder under the stairs, a hallway panelled in tongue and groove on one side with the original wallpaper still on the other, under years of thick paint. And a built-in Victorian corner cupboard in the kitchen, with circular vent holes that gave it an air of broderie anglaise.
It was pulled out during a side return extension a few years after they moved in. They were naive about building work, she says, and she hadn't thought to ask the builders to leave it. By the time she realised, it was gone. "I haven't ever stopped regretting that."
Three words for the house, when pressed: romantic, imperfect, detailed.
Mended things
Molly ripped up the stair and first-floor carpets herself. Sanded and painted the floorboards, several times over the years. Repainted the walls "more times than I am prepared to admit."
In the kitchen, instead of another run of white gloss cupboards, there is a simple wooden surface along one wall with curtains hung beneath it and a dresser top resting on it. She made the curtains. The whole thing came to well under £200, dresser included. "I think it makes the kitchen."
The dresser itself was £125 on Marketplace, bought at a point when she did not know where home was going to be for a while. "It felt solid, dependable, well-built, pretty," she says, "and a statement of my new life." A little larder cupboard with chicken wire doors was £35. She got it into the boot of the car and out again entirely unassisted.
Then there is the Georgian desk, a wedding present, which has been repainted three times. It is currently a chalk grey, with the beading picked out in a soft green from a Little Greene tester pot. She did it in about 20 minutes one evening when the idea arrived, and she did not use masking tape.
"I purposefully didn't make it perfect. The piece is so old, I wanted it to look as if the green had been there forever."
The piano was painted grey 22 years ago, much to her mother's horror. A plain wooden kitchen chair belonged to her grandmother. The pink velvet chair by the fire, with its rustic hessian back, was the first new, expensive, grown-up piece of furniture she ever bought. There is a sheepskin over the arm of it.
The studio
The garden studio arrived last year, and it is modelled on Virginia Woolf's writing room. The walls are bare wood, which gives it a smell she recognises from growing up in a weatherboarded house in Sussex. A long vintage trestle table, thick with years of paint, takes up most of the room. Two tall easels. Double French doors onto the garden. Wall lamps and spotlights for darker days. The floor is wooden and splattered.
Music starts gentle and classical and loosens as the day goes on into something she can sing along to. My Fair Lady. West Side Story. Cat Stevens. Leonard Cohen.
The two halves of her work pull against each other. The abstracts are fast and physical — she often sets out with one idea and finishes somewhere else entirely. The portraits are considered and precise and have to look like the person. "The other is free, impulsive, and always teaches me something about where I'm at on a more subconscious level. It can be quite surprising."
Molly has painted portraits for more than 30 years and still gets nervous before every commission. Once she is in it, two hours can pass without her looking up. "It feels like 20 minutes, and I love that about it."
Knowing when to stop is harder. She has painted on too long before and regretted it. A finished painting, she says, has a quality of being just simple enough and just complex enough.
She works in old jeans and a jumper with an apron or a smock over the top, and a merino gilet when the mornings are cold. Her feet get sore from standing all day, so she stays as close to barefoot as she can manage — bare, or thick socks, or sheepskin slippers.
Blow me down
Molly had sworn never to enter the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition again. She had been rejected once, years earlier, and that was that.
She used to go to the Summer Exhibition with her father. One of five children, so having him to herself was a treat. He urged her, repeatedly, to enter. She stubbornly resisted.
The winter he died, the usual email arrived from the RA about submitting work. "He wasn't there to tell me to," she says, "yet somehow his suggestion was stronger than ever."
Both paintings were selected. She squealed in the street when she saw the email, and rang her mother, and they cried. Both sold before the doors opened to the public, and a third sold from her website as a direct result. She went to Varnishing Day, a tradition running since the 1700s, and walked through the halls at Piccadilly with a glass of champagne, looking at her own work on the wall.
"I just wish Dad had lived to be there with me. He was certainly there in spirit, an arm around my shoulders saying — look at that, Moll. Blow me down."
The middle of the day
There are three cats: Luna, Pasha and Lara. Two are named for the Doctor Zhivago love triangle; Yuri died a few years ago. They earn their keep. "Just seeing one of them asleep on the end of my bed calms me if I'm anxious or rushing."
Mid-morning she stops for coffee at the kitchen counter, on a stool softened with a sheepskin seat pad, the dresser behind her. She always stops for lunch, though it might be at 1pm or at 3.30. She takes a lot of breaks. We were there on one of those June days that makes you forget English weather altogether, and we ate outside.
Her sons are in and out. Both are artists: the eldest a musician working various jobs around his music, the youngest reading Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and also a musician. Their friends are here constantly, particularly in the evenings. "There's always a good discussion and an absolute riot of laughter and wine."
The evening
Molly plays the piano at lunchtime or as the working day ends. It uses a different part of her brain, she says, and she likes the work of mastering a new piece. A bit of fast Mozart to warm her fingers, which drives her sons mad. Then some Beethoven, muddled through, or improvising.
The table always has candles on it. It has done since she married at 24. She clears the day's clutter off it even when it is only the three of them eating spaghetti, and they always sit at the table rather than the sofa — which her sons prefer too, and which delights her. Deep burgundy candles, lamps low, whatever she has cut from the garden. "I love creating an atmosphere conducive to chat," she says, "and a chance to be more open with each other."
Light is the thing she is most adamant about. She wants intimacy: corners lit with a single candle, a lamp glowing in a corner, nothing sharp. "I want to create a place that feels like the most comforting, safe and gentle place we could be." She does it without noticing she is doing it. Her mother and siblings laugh at her, because she arrives at her mother's house and starts switching off lamps, lighting candles and moving furniture, largely unaware.
She does not like blue light, or white light. Overhead lights are, in her words, a whole other subject.
A bath and a fire
Molly redecorated the bathroom last year with the help of a dear friend, keeping the original layout to save money and spending what there was on palette and detail. Her favourite thing in it cost €5: a cotton lace curtain found on a table of second-hand linens at a market in Puglia. She hung it on a piece of bamboo from the garden, slapped some white paint on it, and put in two little brass hooks. "And boom — a curtain."
"I'd love to say I always create a spa-like feel in the bathroom," she says. "But the truth is sometimes I just get in the bath with all the lights on and fall asleep."
When there is time she lights candles and it is beautiful. She is hopeless at rationing bath oil.
The fire is lit every evening through autumn and winter, in the small Victorian fireplace in the sitting room. A sheepskin over the chair, slippers kicked off on the rug, a cat arriving to claim the warmest spot.
"Rather like watching the river, watching the flames is such a primal and grounding way to process the day."
Two things she has sworn never to live without, if at all possible: a fireplace and a bath.
Where it comes from
None of it started with the house. From about 13 she was heaving furniture around her bedroom — the bed, chests of drawers with the drawers still full — rearranging it to match some scene she had in her head. Her mother encouraged it, to the point of suggesting that the cupboard under the stairs looked rather boring, and could she paint something on it.
So she did. The cardboard panel on the side of the bath got an underwater beauty inspired by Botticelli, hair flowing, seaweed tangling. The little loo got a tropical sunrise. The landing cupboards got a view from an Italian palazzo balcony: formal gardens, orange trees, the sea, mountains beyond, and a small naked angel snoozing in the sun. Her father was troubled for years by the fact that the painted balustrade was not structurally sound. It would never have held up those pillars. It made them all laugh.
At 17 she was entirely obsessed with Out of Africa. She hid every modern and electrical object under her bed, apart from a tape player, which played the soundtrack from under there while she drifted around her room. She wanted a mosquito net, in Sussex. She lit only candles, never switched on a light, learned poetry, wrote her diary every day and slept with the curtains open so the moonlight fell on her face. She assembled a wardrobe that could have belonged to Karen Blixen.
"That was my world. And I think it still is."
Paint and Haven
The Instagram account began in 2016, at a point when she felt unmoored in both her careers — acting and painting — and disconnected from her own identity, even her own name. She started photographing beautiful things in her day to anchor herself to the present. A flower on the worktop. A prettily made bed. A flower stall.
She calls it the home of a hopeless romantic. She stepped back from it during a painful period and lost followers and appetite for it, and has come back to it slowly as something she holds lightly and does for the enjoyment.
Ask her what she has learned about her own taste from it and she says she cannot see it from the outside. It is instinct, and always shifting. Pressed, she said this:
"I suppose it's a whole world I create. A world of low evening light, music, a love of morning Mediterranean sunlight when I can find it, simple feminine style with an old-fashioned romantic twist, a love of the care in detail of design — I find that one of the most optimistic things about our world and humanity. Soft, tactile fabrics. Broken edges and mended things. A lived-in world where everything feels it has been there forever."
"The feeling that you could be on the set of a beautiful film — that's my aim, always, and it has been since I was a child."
Two favourite hours
6.30 in the morning, before the city has woken up. Magical, she says, and full of possibility. When she travels, it is the hour she remembers once she is home. Rural southern Italy at dawn, in her opinion, is one of the most beautiful places on earth. And 6.30 in the evening, when she can stop, pour a glass of wine for whoever is there, light a candle and put music on.
The light went slowly, the way it does in June, and we sat with her by the river at the bottom of the garden while the birds carried on.
"If there is one thing I believe," she says, "it is that life is a celebration. Of the miracle of our bodies, the miracle of love. Pain, loss, evolution, change, life, friendship, laughter, music, design, beauty, nature. The brevity of it all, the transience, should be our guiding force and not something to fear."
Live for today.
Molly Gaisford paints from her studio in south west London. Her work was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2024. You can view her paintings on her website mollygaisford.com and her instagram account @paintandhaven
Photographed at home for The Small Home by Caroline Jones.
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