The colour consultant and content creator offers a glimpse behind the scenes of the light-filled Victorian terrace in Edinburgh that jumpstarted her career
Until today I’d never set foot inside Siobhan McFadden’s late-Victorian terrace, but I could have told you all about what lies behind its olivegreen door. I’ve seen the pale timber floorboards, the pleated lampshades, the kids’ teepee in the living room and the porridge-coloured walls. I know the kitchen’s just been repainted, and that the bathroom’s clad in pearly-pink zellige tiles. This is a house with more than 73,000 Instagram followers (if you follow @home__stead, you’re one of them). Vignettes of its serene interiors are saved to countless Pinterest boards. Yet rather unusually for an account this popular, the 41-year-old woman who has spent almost nine years growing it is seldom seen on the grid.
“I’m actually pretty camera-shy,” says Siobhan, handing me a mug of coffee as we settle down to chat by the kitchen fireplace. She is the kind of person you instantly want to be pals with: grounded, genuine, self-effacing. “I know how important it is to show your personality online, and I like it when other people do it,” she adds. “But it can be hard to find the time with everything else going on.”
It’s fair enough. Content creation is the side hustle to Siobhan’s bread-and-butter profession as a colour consultant. Until five years ago she was Farrow & Ball’s regional colour consultant for Scotland, and in 2021 she set up her own consultancy, Studio Homestead, so she could work flexibly around her family. She and husband Rory live in Edinburgh with their three young kids. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to vlog.
Today, Úna, nine, and Nora, six, are at school, while four-yearold Nell’s along the road at nursery. “It’s so funny – my friends always say I could never be a ‘boy mum’,” laughs Siobhan, when I remark that she’s brave bathing such a busy household in soft neutrals. “But girls can be messy too. You’ll notice crayon marks here and there. Nell’s always drawing. Last year she took a biro and wrote her name on the back of the living-room door, the TV stand and the glass cabinet…”
The girls all have a creative streak. Siobhan did too, from a young age. She grew up in the countryside in Donegal, not far from the coast, and had a flair for art that she attributes to her hairdresser mum. Post-school she studied graphic design, then did a degree in print for textiles at Belfast School of Art. “Graphic design was quite fast-paced, whereas textiles felt intricate and meditative,” she says. “I really liked the process of illustrating then putting it into print-and-repeat.”
She is drawn to organic forms. Throughout her home, delicate leaves and branches sprawl across wallpaper and flowers climb up cushions. The kids’ rooms are peppered with needle-felted woodland creatures and Liberty-esque fabrics. It’s no surprise to learn that post-uni, she did an internship in London with Clarissa Hulse, a textile designer renowned for her botanical prints. “It was an amazing experience getting to work in a proper factory, screenprinting designs,” she says. “Then I did another internship with Michael Angove, an incredible illustrator who draws things like vintage spoons and little speckled eggs. I really admired him.”
She was less enamoured of London. “I’m a home bird,” she admits. “I was always the one out of my friend group who never travelled.” Rory, who she’s been with since she was 18, was working in Edinburgh at that time, so she’d come up to visit. “I much preferred it here. I loved that I could walk the length and the breadth of the city. In London I couldn’t get my bearings.”
This is an excerpt from our regular This Life feature about content creator Siobhan McFadden in issue 164 of Homes & Interiors Scotland magazine.
Click here to get your hands on a copy and read the feature in full.
Visit the Studio Homestead website | Follow Home Stead on Instagram
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