Arguably the queen of indulgent easy-cook meals, Nigella Lawson has carved out a unique place in food journalism. Starting out as a food columnist, Nigella has amassed a cooking empire recognised in multiple countries to include television shows, books and even kitchen utensils. This post looks into Nigella Lawson’s House and recent property history:
Though Lawson has occasionally been slammed for overly simplistic ‘recipes’, such as the avacado on toast furore. She is largely considered one of the most loved and well known tv cooks. In the past she has filmed many episodes of her tv show in her own home, however, recently all has not been as it seems.
According to The Daily Mail, the interiors featured on Nigella’s most recent shows, such as At My Table and Cook, Eat, Repeat are actually entirely fabricated. The kitchen with all of its latest gadgets, the lush garden and the book-lined rooms are also fictitious, built on a soundstage at a studio in Acton – five miles away from Nigella’s actual home.
Even the exterior shots of smart London townhouses are all a ploy to make viewers think they are seeing Lawson’s newest home after the divorce and subsequent vacation of the former factory home she shared with ex husband Charles Saatchi.
In reality Nigella Lawson’s home is a £5 million pink-painted mews house on a cobblestoned street in central London. The house, unsurprisingly, has a kitchen that takes up most of the ground floor with windows looking out onto the cobblestone courtyard at the front and also opening out into the rear yard.
Crafted mostly of steel, the kitchen has brightly coloured cabinets, such as bright peppermint green cupboards and a hot pink sink, paired with a triple-door sea green AGA. Steel and copper pans hang from a ceiling rack, and a wall is taken up by the mammoth double-door refrigerator. Exposed shelves display Lawson’s wealth of crockery and cooking utensils. The kitchen occasionally features on Nigella’s instagram account, along with her snug rear garden, strewn with her almost signature fairy-lights.
Though Nigella has taken to filming her cooking shows in a studio rather than her own home, a slight replica of her latest kitchen was featured on Simply Nigella, which first aired back in 2015 and can be rewatched on the BBC. Though the floorplan is much larger and the kitchen island repositioned, it has the same style and colour cabinets and similar windows (though the studio version are sash windows).
The modestly-sized property is a huge down-size from the 7-bedroom villa she shared with her second husband, which featured a underground swimming pool, wine cellar, integrated 3-car garage, a private cinema and enough room to display Saatchi’s colossal art collection.
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The £12.3 million property, which was bought in cash in 2010 and converted from a gas works factory and mannequins showroom, reportedly had a £500,000 kitchen installed that was used for the filming of Nigella’s cooking shows.
