Slow Mornings | Africa Daley-Clarke

Last Christmas, interior stylist Africa Daley-Clarke and her husband Jermel renovated a doll’s house for their children. “We bought real floorboards for the ground floor, laid quarry tiles in the kitchen and patterned wallpapers which Jermel cut to size,” she says. “Every night in December, after the children had gone to bed, he’d do another room.” Africa had found the doll’s house on a second-hand website, as well as a haul of miniature furniture, so that they could do it up so that it looked just like their own house on the Kent coast. 

The resemblance between the houses, large and small, is in the architectural style – both double-fronted Victorian villas – and the palette of colours and textures: earthy neutrals, muted pinks and mustards, jute and seagrass, old stripped pine and delicate patterns. I would happily live in either. 

The couple moved to Kent from London three years ago, just after they’d had their third child. They had been living in a two bedroom flat in Islington and, says Africa, their desire for more space was catalysed by the pandemic. Without any certainty about whether there would be future lockdowns, they started looking for houses outside of the city, based on where they could afford enough room for friends and family to come to stay. “This house had all the good bones,” says Africa, “like big reception rooms and a huge garden,” but it needed work. Since they moved in, the Daley-Clarkes have gradually made it their own, removing seventies features like a rainbow ceiling rose in favour of bare wood, gauzy cafe curtains and shelves filled with antiquarian books and found objects.

Africa and Jermel both grew up in London but have adjusted to life beside the sea seamlessly. “I thought the transition would be harder,” says Jermel – who like Africa, had worked in high pressure retail jobs with punishing hours before they made the move – “but I found the quietness of the Kent coast so calming. In London, I can’t get a clear headspace, you’re always on the clock.” 

While Africa has focussed on the house, Jermel has led in the garden. Having a big outdoor space was important not just for the children, but him too. “Before we left London, he was growing tomatoes on top of our bin storage,” says Africa. “My garden brings me a strong sense of peace and accomplishment,” Jermel agrees. He’s put it to sleep for the year now and has turned all his beds, but tells me that in the height of summer, he had 15 varieties of tomato, sweetcorn, cucumber, squash, sugar snap peas, courgettes. “I give a lot of it away,” he says, “but the kids love making pizza and pasta sauces with the tomatoes we’ve grown, and it means something that they know where the ingredients have come from.” 

The Daley-Clarkes have created an idyllic and very peaceful setting in which to raise their children, but Africa tells me that they have never felt able to take this for granted. “ We are uniquely placed to pre-empt some of the prejudice our children may face, and work hard to parent consciously to support that,” she explains.” The beginnings of The Vitamin D Project, a platform which promotes social justice and sustainability through the lens of design, began when their first child, a girl, was born: “Initially it was just an outlet. I didn’t have any mum friends and I was worried that, because of our attributes, people might treat our children in a certain way.” She and Jermel wanted their kids to be able to call out racial prejudice; "raising carefree, innocent and happy Black children is a political act,” she says, starkly.

Soon after she started the project, knowing that she was interested in interior design, Africa became a showroom manager for a well-known furniture company. “It was a very white environment,” she says, “and I used my social media to talk about the vacuum I was in. I wanted to find like-minded people muddling through the same kinds of things.” Around the same time, Africa was discovering slow fashion for children, keen to dress her kids in ethical threads. She noticed that none of the brands she liked featured Black children in their campaigns. Once or twice she approached them to ask if they had a shortage of models, receiving only lazy responses about "customers with a certain look." “I started to talk about things like this, that concerned me about raising Black children” – the importance of them seeing themselves reflected in popular culture – “and not harming the earth. My following grew because I was raw and unfiltered.” 

Africa’s Instagram following grew by an unprecedented 50,000 after 2 June 2020, the day George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, prompting the Black Lives Matter movement to launch protests across much of the world. Suddenly, the brands that had previously dismissed her questions about lack of diversity took on what Africa describes as “a scrambling approach,” anxiously looking for advice from campaigners like herself; “they could no longer pretend that they didn’t know they were doing it wrong,” she says. The reasons were cynical, she agrees, yet the growth that The Vitamin D Project saw during that time catapulted the Daley-Clarkes to where they are now. “We’re extremely grateful to the platform,” Africa tells me, “it changed our lives and enabled us to buy a home.” Nowadays, she and Jermel both work full time in their respective fields of Operations and Marketing, so she picks up her Vitamin D Project work – which spans advocacy work, small brand consultancy and interiors inspiration – after they have gone to bed. 

What do slow mornings look like at their house? Weekdays are long for them all, so they use these days for a family reset. Jermel gets up early with the children, they feed the chickens, they make pancakes. “I try to lie in,” says Africa, “but when I smell the pancakes, suddenly I’m awake.” By 7.30am, they’re all huddled up together on the sofa. “The kids have so much structure in the week, we want them to be able to dip in and out of different things at home in their down time,” says Jermel. The couple describe how they set up different activity stations in each room, so that they can be together yet independent. It was with this in mind that they sought out and customised the doll’s house last Christmas. 

Christmas will be an intensification of those slow mornings, with Jermel cooking two meats, salmon, piles of veg and all the trimmings. Family will visit, of course, but on the day itself, it’ll be just the six of them. Today they are decorating their tree with hand-crafted decorations by TOAST. “I’m a bit of a maximalist,” Africa laughs, enjoying the opportunity to put beautiful things somewhere else in the house. “I just love that these hand-painted baubles are naturally shatter-proof. Nothing here is precious, and nothing is off-limits to the kids." She puts the lokta paper star on top of the tree. I shouldn't think the kids will manage to reach that, though.

Africa wears the Crinkle Cotton Pyjamas. Jermel wears the Frank Cotton Long Sleeve Tee, Soft Organic Cord Relaxed Shirt, and Soft Organic Cord Lounge Trousers. The Tile Cotton Patchwork Quilt, Contrast Rim Enamel Mug, Concertina Petal Paper Garland, Poterie Barbotine Marbled Dish, and Hand Marbled Bauble also feature. 

Words by Mina Holland.

Photography by Elena Heatherwick.