Inside Damian Dibben's London home

Author Damian Dibben’s lofty Southwark home is a masterclass in marrying the old with the vibrant and new, as Pip McCormac discovers
Damian Dibben shot by Paul Raeside
Pip McCormac26 September 2019

Down a side street in Southwark, a few doors up from a rickety old house where Nell Gwynne is once thought to have lived, and beside the industrial-sized shadow of Tate Modern , stands a 1990s block of flats that couldn’t evoke its era any better.

The main entrance is set into the curve of a bright orange brick wall, the internal doors are covered in sheets of that hammered silver metal particular to the time, and a few floors up sits the grandly proportioned pied-à-terre of the author, screenwriter and long-suffering owner of three dogs, Damian Dibben.

‘When I bought the place before the Tate was converted, my friends called me ridiculous — there was nothing on the South Bank back then,’ says Dibben, but his creative calling nudged him towards ‘the best combination of the past, present and future. You can almost feel William Shakespeare walking around it’.

These days, it’s obvious he made the right decision. With ceilings at 3.6 metres high and windows entirely covering one wall, the space is filled with a very now collection of jewel-bright furniture and lamps, birds (both ornamental and taxidermy), 300-year-old tapestries, 1950s American art bought for £12 on eBay and more books than anyone could ever wish to have time to read. This could only be the home of a contemporary creative mind.

‘All life is colour, and I love the fact that each colour has a mood, has a feel to it,’ says Dibben, sitting at an asymmetrical table he made to go next to the hatch into the kitchen. ‘This flat makes me feel very comfortable, with space to breathe.’

Countless books fill Dibben’s vibrant home (Paul Raeside)

The compact yet stylish apartment, which is on several floors that all seem to shoot off from each other, has three bedrooms. The space is a paradise of carefully curated objects, a Luke Edward Hall palette and an elegant, eclectic Sir John Soane sensibility. A vast painting of a tropical vista takes up most of one wall — the place you might expect a TV to be located in a more conventional home — with a parrot soaring across an Amazonian river. It is, in fact, two panels of hand-painted wallpaper from De Gournay, fastened to canvas and framed. The parrot is a late edition, added to cover a rip accidentally made by Dibben, and the golden sun — or is it a moon? — was painted on later, on a whim.

‘It’s a bit of escapism, really,’ Dibben says of the artwork, although he could be talking about the decor of the whole apartment. ‘Everything here is something that induces that feeling of escapism, that has a sense of history to it.’ And that makes his central London home, so full of exotic trinkets, seem almost otherworldly.

Dibben’s books are a source of escapism for the reader, too, a glimpse into different places and times that have long fascinated the author (as a child growing up near the museums of South Kensington his curiosity about everything — from volcanoes to art —was clearly piqued at a young age).

Dibben’s eclectic taste spans antique tapestries to modern art pieces (Paul Raeside)

The History Keepers, a series of young adult books written by Dibben, follows a boy from London who is catapulted into the past when he goes in search of his parents who have somehow got lost there. His most recent novel, Tomorrow, written for adults, is the story of a dog that follows his nose for centuries in an eternal quest to find his master. Dibben has called it ‘an epic tale of love, of courage, of hope’, and while he says his books are about bringing historical events to life, he admits that there is also a common thread of looking for loved ones. ‘It’s funny,’ he says, ‘because although I knew what Tomorrow’s master looked like, it was only when I had a vivid dream about my father that I realised my character was exactly him.’

Dibben comes from a long line of interesting men. His grandfather, Horace ‘Hod’ Dibben, owned The Black Sheep nightclub, and his father, Michael, founded a company that reinvented the use of cast concrete. When Dibben’s father died suddenly when Damian was 18, the teenager was left with a huge collection of furniture, art and oddities — and nowhere to put them. ‘Sotheby’s sold the whole lot off, and it was only about three quarters of the way through [the sale] that I thought, “What have I done [in allowing this]?”’ Dibben says. ‘That has been my excuse for building my own collection ever since.’

Dibben picked up this work in Miami (Paul Raeside)

He now sources pieces from places as varied as Paul Smith Furniture Shop, where he bought the huge blue lamp in the sitting room, to Made.com for the coordinating blue velvet bench. The arched mirror was a window from a French factory, to which he added mirrored panes, the rug is from eBay.

Dibben’s interests range wildly, from the colour seen in his home — his next novel, The Colourist, out in 2021, is about the discovery of pigments in Venice during the Renaissance — to architecture. He is often to be found using a saw to create more shelving for his books, or wandering the local area looking at new buildings. ‘It’s great seeing the city get taller and with more scale.’ He was obsessed by the construction of The Shard, and thinks the failure in getting the Garden Bridge built was a great loss to the neighbourhood. ‘I was so upset,’ he says. ‘People made a fuss about how four trees would have been pulled down, but it would have had 200 on it.’

Dibben shares his home with Ali, a fashion PR, and their dogs Dudley, Daphne and Velvet. They alternate between sleeping, chewing and barking, and prefer Dibben’s other home in West Sussex, where he lives for much of the week. At one point, Daphne starts ripping a cushion to shreds but, following his shouts to stop, Dibben admits he doesn’t mind too much.

The beauty of this home is that its treasures are more about the story behind them than their actual value. And the odd tooth mark or two only adds to the feeling of a life being lived.

‘Tomorrow’ is out now in paperback

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