The London street artist Sophie Mess on her colourful Devon home

The street artist Sophie Mess is famous for her murals featuring scaled-up and colourful flowers, so when the time came to renovate her home, she extended these themes to its walls, incorporating colour and botanical elements at every corner.

“I just love colour!” says Mess, 36. “It’s fun and joyful, and helps give a positive vibe. I feel like some people say, ‘It’s such a big decision what colour I’m going to paint this,’ whereas because of the work that I do I’m like, ‘Oh, if I don’t like it we’ll paint over it.’

“I’m so used to that kind of work, so that’s my mentality. It gives us a lot more freedom to just try it, and if those colours look crap we paint over them.”

Mess has always been inspired by nature; having lived most of her life near Honiton, she has grown up surrounded by the East Devon National Landscape.

She moved to London in 2015 to work with a street art collective. They painted commissioned murals for bars, restaurants and offices, and Mess was taught by graffiti artists how to spray-paint and got used to creating art in the public realm.

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But Mess missed nature while living in the city and found herself constantly trying to fit large flowers into every project.

“Whenever I got a chance to paint a wall, that was what I gravitated to. In retrospect there was that element of missing that connection to nature because I’m from the countryside.

“Spray-paint is really great for creating those colour fades and gradients, and I love painting that organic, colourful vibe. It brought me joy and that was as simple as it was to begin with, but then I realised that it was fun for everyone else.

“Walking by, people would say, ‘Oh, I saw your giant flowers on my commute to work and they put a smile on my face!’ So I realised that other people felt that too, and that encouraged me to keep pushing and developing that.

“I was trying to slip big, colourful flowers into every brief, so it got to a point where I’d kind of outgrown it and I just wanted to do my own thing.”

While her electric flowers don’t feature too heavily in her home, Mess has filled the space with little prints and some of her original works, as well as those by artists she’s met while travelling around the world. There are also plenty of plants for her to draw on elements of nature.

“Colour is so personal. Downstairs are blues and yellows, and the bedroom and my studio are teal. It’s mainly those cooler colours, but I think it’s such a personal preference and our house feels very personal — it really feels like an extension of us.” During Covid, Mess left the collective and went back to Honiton where she lives with James, her partner of six years, and their dog, Olio.

“Our house is very colourful, but what makes it so personal is that we’ve made every little decision of how things are. We’ve chosen every tile, every colour, and I think there are a lot of elements that make it quite sentimental.”

“My boyfriend was living down here and I was in London. So then when the pandemic happened, I moved and we really kind of randomly ended up buying this house. It was one of those things that came together so easily, it was meant to be.”

Mess has gained commissions by emailing bars and restaurants, which has led to her work being exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery’s Flowers — Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture exhibition.

“I spent a lot of time designing murals that I wanted to paint. I wasn’t out painting them because it was lockdown, but it gave me that space to really build on my style. Looking back, that helped me onto a really clear trajectory of what I wanted.”

When Mess and her partner were travelling around Europe in a camper van after Covid she booked her first solo job in Italy. “I painted a rooftop bar in Rome. Throughout our trip I’d reach out to hotels or other places and say, ‘I’m passing through, are you interested in any murals?’”

She still travels up to London for work a lot, and also travels around the world, but doesn’t see herself and her partner moving out of their Devonshire bolt hole any time soon. “I love Devon. I really loved my time in London, but I’m from Devon. I’m such a country girl, so I’m happy in Devon.”

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