The west London suburb of Acton is not the sort of place you would expect to
find the gentleman actor Nat Parker. Then again, neither would you expect
his glamorous wife, Anna, to open the door with her hair in curlers, tied up
Nora Batty-style, with a Cath Kidston twist. And you certainly wouldn’t
expect Parker to be patiently redirecting mail to the previous owners of the
house. After two years, most people would be chucking it in the bin.
Yet Parker, 46, who is best known as Inspector Thomas Lynley, the dashing earl
in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, is grateful that they agreed to sell to
him in the first place. He’s convinced they didn’t really want to.
“Anna’s interior-design partner, who lives on this road, has her ear to the
ground and heard that they might be persuaded to sell,” he says. “Luckily,
they asked for exactly what we were prepared to pay. Then Anna said it
needed only £30,000 of work. You’d think I’d learn, after 15 years of
marriage! It took 10 times that.”
Parker doesn’t seem to mind. He loves the house and the neighbourhood,
although it is a world away from his previous stamping ground. The son of
Sir Peter Parker, former chairman of British Rail, Nat grew up in Notting
Hill. “That’s my manor, really,” he says.
As London suburbs go, Acton has a lot going for it, what with its general
leafiness, solid Victorian houses and numerous stations, but Notting Hill it
ain’t. So why the move?
“A lot of it was the garden,” says Parker, eager to show off his weed-free
borders, thriving olive trees and newly acquired knowledge of “clematis
wilt”. The children have a treehouse, transformed by a coat of paint from a
cheap garden-centre shed on stilts to something more romantic. The once
straight edge of the lawn undulates gently, “because life isn’t about
straight lines”.
The new-look lawn might have been inspired by the actor’s own career, which
has just taken a bit of a swerve, although he manages to be sanguine about
last year’s decision by the BBC to kill off Lynley.
“It was a great shame,” he says. “I was surprised, because it was so
successful, but it was also a kind of relief, like a cloak had been taken
off me. Now I have a chance to do other things.” He has since made two
movies: Flawless, with Demi Moore and Michael Caine, and the forthcoming
Malice in Wonderland, in which he plays a gay gangster. “It’s been a
blessing in many ways.”
Parker is less understanding when it comes to those who think he’s had it
easy. “Years ago, an actor said he had a problem with me because he felt I’d
been born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” he says. “I said, ‘First, what
difference would it make if I had? And second, I wasn’t.’ Dad came to this
country at 14 with no money. He went to school on a scholarship, Oxford on a
scholarship, and ended up a member of the Fabian Society, an actor and a
politician, as well as head of British Rail.
“All I was given was love and support in everything I did, from both parents.
Without that, I wouldn’t be Nat,” Parker says. He gives that same love and
support to his wife. “I’ve always wanted to bottle and sell her,” he says.
“She creates spaces people want to live in. Her ‘wow factor’ is one of the
reasons I fell in love with her.”
Even in these days of the extreme house makeover, Anna stands out from the
crowd. In 1992, the couple started married life in a one-bedroom flat in
Notting Hill, but within a year they had moved to part of a converted
Victorian schoolhouse in Battersea, south London. “It’s called William Blake
House, which is apt, as Dad used to be a chair of the Blake Society and we
were very much brought up on him.”
Their section of the old school had 4,500 sq ft of space, in the days before
loft-style living had taken off. “The property developers couldn’t get rid
of it at first. Nobody knew what to do with such vast rooms,” he says. “Anna
just went for it. We had a bath and a loo in the middle of our bedroom long
before people were doing such things. The developer took photographs, put
them in the brochure and sold the lot.
“She changed our space into a beautiful mansion, so it had more or less
quadrupled in value when we sold it seven years later, for £1m, to Greg
Rused-ski [the tennis player], who insisted on the kitchen table as part of
the deal. Now Orlando Bloom lives next door and the kitchen alone would sell
for £1m. People make whole flats out of them.” The area wasn’t villagey
enough for the Parkers, though. “The heart and soul wasn’t there and it was
a relief to leave,” he says.
Next stop was Elsham Road, on the borders of Holland Park and Shepherd’s Bush.
“We bought one of the few whole houses in the street,” he says. “I liked the
lovely wooden floor. Next thing I knew, Anna had ripped it out, so
downstairs had a ceiling of 30-odd feet.”
The paved front area was transformed with a waterfall in his wife’s effortless
fashion. They were there for six years and left partly because Nat wanted
the children – Angelica (Angel), 11, and Raphaella (Raffi), 9 – to have a
garden.
There were other reasons, too. “It’s a busy street and the house was always
dirty,” he says. “I can’t bear lime trees, and my car got clamped or got a
ticket every weekend.”
If Battersea had been a step too far, Acton was a brave move that’s paid off.
“I was pretty nervous about moving here, but within two days I felt more at
home than I ever did in any of our other places. I don’t know why. Maybe
it’s the garden, away from what Dad called the ‘aural bruising’ of London.”
Or maybe it’s the house. When Anna first found it, she warned Nat that it
didn’t have the “wow factor”. And she’s right, if “wow” means 30ft ceilings,
waterfalls and loos in bedrooms. If, however, it means a light, spacious
home that manages to be modern, interesting and comfortable, while avoiding
most of the clichés of today’s show homes, then “wow” it is.
It was largely a case of paring down, opening up and paying attention to
detail. The floors in the kitchen and hall are plain porcelain; the stairs
are covered in thick silk, with stripes going from side to side for a
change. The double reception room features wide planks of washed Danish pine.
The couple’s bedroom – with a hand-paintedfloral frieze over the bed and the
magnificently gaudy Murano mirror and chandelier – opens straight into a
study on one side and a huge bathroom, with a mini-gym and a grandiose
artificial-flower arrangement, on the other. Downstairs, the simple
fireplaces – “cheap as chips” – were designed by Anna, as was the oak table,
which she treated herself, using a scrubbing brush and industrial bleach.
Nat worried that the wooden floor might be too soft, and that two fireplaces
in one room might not work; he also couldn’t see what was wrong with the
kitchen island. The new one, though, with a marble top, is a triumph. “I
just go with it,” he says. “Anna makes me feel as if I’ve done some of the
deciding.”
All in all, it’s no surprise to hear that P and P Interiors, the
interior-design service set up by Anna with Tania Payne, a fellow mum at the
girls’ school, is thriving by word of mouth. “Work has just rolled in for
us,” she says. “I was an actress for years, but when I had kids I floated
out. Now I have no desire to float back in. Actors continually have their
hands up, saying, ‘Please love me.’ That’s not for me.”
One of Anna’s favourite places in the house is the veranda, a homage to
Australia, the birthplace of her mother. It typifies her approach, which,
while hardly cutting-edge, is full of delightful surprises. Here, at the
back of the open-plan kitchen, the predictable response would be for an
elegant inside-outside glass garden room. A veranda is more interesting –
and relaxed.
It’s like the difference between Acton and Notting Hill. “Notting Hill is just
not bohemian any more,” she says. “And I like being slightly outside the
zone. It’s more peaceful and less overwhelming. It’s also anonymous, and you
don’t feel you have to do your hair to walk down the street.”
Nat feels much the same. “I don’t miss Notting Hill at all,” he says, “though
I like going to Portobello occasionally, and seeing some chums. Here, I like
having to stop for the level crossing at the end of the road. There’s
nothing to do but sit and think for five minutes, and it makes me feel I’m
in the country. My dream is to wake up and see a field outside with my horse
in it.”
So far, the nearest he has come to that dream is to own a few parts of
race-horses in a syndicate, but he loves the view over allotments from his
bedroom window, and over his garden from the veranda. Yes, Acton suits this
man just as well as those curlers suit his wife.
P and P Interiors; 07956 404965
