What I Rent: Artist and homeware designer Anna Jacobs

How much do you pay? Do you have any side hustles?

My rent is £1,985 and my bills are about £550/month. Yes, I do – I hire it out as a shoot location for photography and film through a brilliant platform called Peerspace. I live here with my two children, Zachary, 15, and Coco Rose, 12.

What do you get for it?

The flat is three double bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom and utility room, plus a big garden backing on to woodland. It sits within an incredible Victorian house in Crystal Palace with high ceilings and some of the original intricate plaster work and cornicing. It also has original wooden floors and the loo is in a tiny room up a miniature wooden staircase set in the bathroom. There’s also a stunning and unusual large oval window in the master bedroom and a pretty round porthole window in the loo.

Why do you decide to rent?

Would you buy again?

I would love to, but there are huge advantages to renting, too. For a start, the landlord takes care of anything that goes wrong – a total joy. That means your monthly budget is more consistent with no big surprises (bar wider economic crises). It also means that if you want to move it’s a much simpler, faster, cheaper process.

Have you done it up?

Yes, I’ve painted the whole thing, changing it from taupe neutrals to lots of bright colours and hand-painted murals. It’s been a lot of fun. When I first met the landlord, before signing the agreement, I told him I’d like to repaint it in lots of bright colours, photograph it for Instagram, use it in photoshoots, etc. He said that was absolutely fine and I could do what I wanted, because by sheer coincidence it turned out he and his partner were already a fan of my design brand.

What inspired the amazing interior design?

Why thank you. When I changed career in my early 40s I did a short course on interior decorating at Chelsea College of Arts and on interior styling at Central St Martin’s. Both those courses taught me how to plan and construct a cohesive design and encouraged me to go bold or go home.

My two main inspirations are the natural world and art. Nature has so many incredible colour palettes and is always an exquisite balance of light and shade, different textures and beautiful forms. I think I also experience it in a slightly enhanced way, almost like technicolour and that’s reflected in my interior decorating.

Art often distils those elements to create a moment of wonder that you can keep coming back to. My style builds on that, so that the interior almost becomes a 3D piece of art that you can exist within.

How does the property feel?

The whole flat feels joyful and makes all of us smile. When you just see all the photos together, lots of people comment that it looks really full on and over the top and possibly difficult to live in. However, without fail, every person who’s ever visited has expressed their surprise at how peaceful and relaxing it feels, despite the amount of colour and pattern and that it makes them feel so happy.