DJ Whinnie Williams styled a neglected Margate semi in her own inimitable style.
She has been a support act for Ellie Goulding and Mark Ronson, co-written a song for Madonna and is regularly snapped with glamorous BFFs Zara Martin and Millie Mackintosh.
But these days you are more likely to find singer and DJ Whinnie Williams poring over her latest hand-embroidered poodle-print wallpaper designs or retiling her bathroom in candy pink with a job lot from Ebay.
‘I describe myself as a cross between Brigitte Bardot and Del Boy,’ says Whinnie, resplendent in a white jumpsuit and with perfectly hot-rollered hair at her home in Margate.
‘I suppose I was born in the wrong era, really. I love the 1960s and 1970s, with all those fabulous textures. I’ll admit a lot of the furniture is gross, but I love to find the beauty in everything.
‘Take the huge brown sofa in my living room, for example – it should really have been binned, but it is so comfortable, everybody loves it.’
In anyone else’s home, the salvaged sofa might indeed look fit only for the tip, but Whinnie has elevated it to a piece of art.
Sitting on a bold red and white striped vinyl floor (‘hardwearing for parties’), it’s covered with cerise fur and chain-link cushions, designed by Whinnie, with one of her own abstract paintings – created out of a discarded piece of plywood and with a bin brush used for a paintbrush – hung above it.
Readers will get the gist, then, that Whinnie – who is in her early thirties and has a background in set design – loves to combine her creativity with an irreverent sense of humour.
And it’s this streak of fun and inventiveness that has led her to swap the pop world full-time for Poodle & Blonde (poodleandblonde.com) the homewares brand she founded in 2018 with interiors production consultant Kierra Campbell.
Specialising in delicate wallpapers that feature, for example, storks delivering takeaway food, and tasseled animal and bamboo-print cushions, the online store is a one-stop shop for beautifully crafted, but tongue-in-cheek pieces.
And the heart of its creative operations is Whinnie’s own wildly eclectic seaside home, which she shares with her fiancé, the documentary and video maker Tom Dream, and a menagerie of nearly 20 pets, including dogs, cats, chickens and a rabbit found hopping through Hackney.
‘We came down to Margate from Ilford a few years ago, to spend summer with a friend,’ Broxbourne-born Whinnie says.
‘I instantly felt that the days seemed longer here than in London, and that I was connected to nature.
‘Plus, it’s the only place you can get a vegan burger, see a drag show and jump in the sea in the space of a few hours. We knew we wanted to live here.’
The couple managed to snap up a shabby Victorian house, within walking distance of the sea, ‘for the price of a studio flat in Bow’, Whinnie says.
‘It had been divided up into five bedsits, and there was lots of bobbly wallpaper everywhere. It had been on the market for ages, as nobody wanted to buy it.’
The house’s transformation from shabby seaside HMO to retro movie-set cum love nest – with its aesthetics inspired by an old-fashioned terrazzo-floored hair salon the pair came across in Venice – has been showcased to Whinnie’s 30,000 Instagram followers (@whinniewilliams).
Here you can see her individually themed rooms, often based around one piece of furniture or a colour scheme she loves, with Whinnie herself in pleather trenchcoat, platform boots – and paint brush in hand
‘When builders told us we would need about £80,000 to renovate the home – of which we had about a quarter – it was time to get stuck in ourselves,’ Whinnie says.
‘I have been collecting my whole life, from Ebay, car boot sales and charity shops, so had piles of stuff before I even owned a home.’
She dreamed up her pink bathroom years ago, for example, having fallen in love with some tiles she spotted on Ebay – ‘I nabbed them cheap’ – and which she stored in the garden of her last home.
She cleverly sourced the matching vintage pink sink, loo and bath for about £250, and gold swan taps and matching wall lights, also from Ebay.
In her and Tom’s “Mermaid Room”, one of three bedrooms, the centrepiece is a huge blue shell-shaped padded bedstead, with built-in radio and cassette player and matching footstool, which she bought for £700 from a vintage seller she found on Instagram.
She took the underwater fantasy scheme a few steps further, covering the period fireplace in thousands of shells, collected from the local beach, hanging a shell chandelier and hand stenciling a delicate marine theme on the walls.
In the next bedroom, a large step-up bed was built by Whinnie’s brother, and features a built-in turntable and speakers.
‘Music is a huge part of our lives, so we wanted to make sure we had the right spaces for jam nights and to do music video shoots all over the house,’ Whinnie says.
‘And although I wanted a glamorous space, I needed to make sure my home was trashable, too. I don’t want to be too precious about things.’
Downstairs, in the dining room, the home’s 1970s floor-to-ceiling brick fireplace and bar were kept in situ.
‘Most people would have wanted to get rid of that,’ Whinnie laughs, ‘but of course I loved it.’
Her lockdown project this summer has been transforming the rear garden into a Miami-inspired space, with pink walls and “Margate” picked out in blue mosaic tiles, in homage to the local art deco lido.
An enclosure for her animals sits behind a white picket fence, and, in the pond, Tom is breeding goldfish.
‘My dream is to eventually live on a farm, somewhere in the Kentish countryside,’ Whinnie says.
In the meantime, there’s her ‘massive, weird Del Boy wedding’ to plan, and the online course she is designing on how to create the perfect location and shoot house (watch her Instagram for more details).
‘The most important thing, though, is that you create a home that you really love,’ Whinnie says.
‘It makes me sad when people are just worried about what would look right when reselling. It’s so important to follow your heart.’
You can see Whinnie’s designs of www.poodleandbone.com.
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