Dracula lived in a crumbling castle in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania. The Addams Family resided in their towering, dilapidated mansion, 0001 Cemetery Lane. Victor Frankenstein created his monster sequestered in an attic laboratory in the German city of Ingolstadt. And so where to find Tish Weinstock, 2024’s posh goth; the beauty editor, model and author? A four-storey, double fronted detached townhouse in Ladbroke Grove, darling!
As promised, she appears at the top of 12 concrete steps with wrought iron bannisters, cloaked in a black, ruched silk skirt and tight black leather shirt one wet, windy afternoon. Weinstock is something of a London legend, having worked her way up on the beauty desks at magazines Dazed and i-D, before settling on her current contributing role at British Vogue and beauty director at System magazine. She is crisply spoken, fabulously gossipy, and counts It girls from Kate Moss to Lady Lola Bute, Jazzy De Lisser and Camille Charrière as best friends.
Her brand is all macabre, whether that’s wearing dark, lace naked dresses to sit front row at Paris Fashion Week, or her day-to-day white-faced look, complete with a bloody lip (courtesy of Byredo), eyeliner (from Hourglass) and tumbling liquorice hair. This month she has consolidated her authority on the genre, putting her University of Oxford BA in Art History, Criticism and Conservation to use, publishing a book titled How to Be a Goth, packed with style and beauty advice as well as a host of pin-up heroines (from Susie Cave to 1920s silent film star Theda Bara), “for women who are drawn to the darkside”.
As such, she takes her living quarters deathly seriously. “Houses are so interesting. It’s a sort of physical manifestation of who you are. How you do it up and what you gravitate towards says something about you,” she says, perched on her high backed, 1970s bentwood Thonet kitchen chairs surrounded by the gothic, arched windows which line the kitchen. “These were brought in from a church by the previous owners,” she says of the windows. “When we saw them, and the stained glass on the staircase, I thought: this is heaven. Really quite dramatic.”
“We” refers to her husband, model-turned-stylist Tom Guinness, who is known for lengthy tenures at Arena Homme+ and Pop magazine and ingenuity shaping labels from Stüssy to Wales Bonner. The pair share this home, which they moved into only two months ago, with five-year-old son Reuben and one-year-old daughter Phoenix.
As well as both working in the fashion business, the couple also share an illustrious line of ancestors who owned family homes to be proud of: Weinstock’s industrialist grandfather, the late Lord Weinstock, lived in Wiltshire’s Bowden Park; Guinness’s grandfather, Bryan Guinness, Second Baron Moyne, had Biddesden House in the same county. Following suit, since 2019, the pair have their own six-bed Wiltshire spot, which they escape to most weekends. They married, in a suitable display of dark grandeur (animal bone arches and all) in Belvoir Castle over the Halloween weekend in 2022. It was the British society wedding of the year.
Though it might all sound ever so grand, Weinstock is relaxed, friendly and good fun.
“I have grown up in places where I was told, ‘Don’t go in there’. It just creates a stiffness and a formality that I don’t want to force my kids to do,” she says. “Everywhere here is for everyone. Although it looks like a formal drawing room, Reuben watches Ninjago in there, and we have all had a sleepover in the day bed.”
Said day bed, which was banished to a spare room at their previous London abode in Holland Park, has taken centre stage at the new house. She found it online and had it shipped from France, despite multiple warnings it would not survive the trip. “I mean look at it,” she says, pointing to its ragged cloth curtains and general air of decay. “I didn’t pick it for its robustness. I love that it’s falling apart. It’s very aged, antique, quite sort of the ghosts of other people. That’s kind of the vibe that I wanna spread everywhere here.”
Day beds are just one of the motifs Weinstock counts as gothic home essentials. Others include tapestries (“it’s amazing to be able to look into another world and time from London”), busts, plinths and portraits of dead people. “In the Addams Family home they have ancestral portraits everywhere. I don’t have any portraits of my ancestors, but I’ve got other people’s that I found in Kempton Market. It’s about filling the house with quirky stuff.” Other macabre tricks include: “A bit of religious iconography here, little shrines or antique fonts there. Candles everywhere. And they love a horn — so if you happen to see some antlers lying around …”
She is still at chapter one with this house, which means putting her head in books “of interior designers I love, or people who have got fabulous homes”. Examples that come to mind are John Richardson: At Home, Pablo Picasso’s biographer, and David Hicks. “I get the idea then I find the look for less. It’s about being patient,” she says. Where does she source her pieces? “I’m such an online whore,” she laughs, “sellingantiques.co.uk is really good. I get a lot of stuff from Etsy and eBay, and, again, Kempton Market is brilliant.” Other suggestions include Decorative Collective, Lorfords, Lassco and Blanchard in Wiltshire, while extra-special items, like a stamp-covered fire guard, come via London interiors whizz Jermaine Gallacher.
And she has lofty ambitions: namely in the main bedroom, already filled with a mighty, four poster bed. “We have been talking about oxblood for the bedroom. In the olden days apparently they used actual ox blood as a pigment,” she says. “I don’t think you’re allowed to do that today, Peta might have some severe words, but I am looking for a clotted blood effect on the walls.” She is at work making the lower ground floor “a sort of conservatory den kind of thing” while the top offers “generous rooms for the children”.
“All the other places we looked at had really pokey areas for the kids. To be a really happy teenager you want your space. I’m expecting someone to slam the door in my face and scream, ‘F*** you, Mum!’ You can do it in those rooms.” And there are personal adult rooms, too: Guinness has a gold-walled office, lined with books, while Weinstock is in the process of creating her “women cave”. “I want black lacquer walls and leopard print. It’s my space.”
Despite only being here a handful of months, Weinstock appears unquestionably settled. “The bones of it really lent itself to my gothic and romantic imagination. After we just put all our stuff in I instantly turned to Tom and said, ‘Oh, this is home already.’”
