Bringing the tropics to London was Valerie Leipheimer’s colourful and leafy mission when she and her husband Peter Allen bought this Victorian terrace seven years ago, when their son Logan was a toddler, and his brother Jensen was a bump in his mum’s tummy. ‘Pete and I spent a lot of time travelling before we had the boys, ’ Valerie explains, ‘so I wanted to reflect our tropical vacations in our new home. Also, I was born and raised in California and lived and worked in New York and Italy before I met my English husband and settled here in London, so I’ve developed a love of contemporary architecture and design that I thought would fuse really well with an older property.’