Our Place: Artist Simone Anderson

Simone Anderson is a successful artist known for her allegorical and provocative art, mixing body parts with birds, religion with skulls and beauty with macabre symbols. She works from home in her 1930s house in the lower Kamais which she shares with her builder partner Mark, her three children, Olive, 8, twins Ivy and Felix, 6 and cats Zippy, Zucchini and Decrepo.

This is the room where we end up after dinner parties. In the summer we open the French doors to the deck. Many a sneaky afternoon has been spent drinking wine with girlfriends while our collective kids run wild in the acre of garden outside.

I couldn't live with generic themes in a room. I am particular about placement of objects. It might look cluttered or willy-nilly to some but to me there is harmony. It's a bit like a patchwork quilt. Every piece has a story or tweaks a memory here and there. I like things to have an aged-looking patina. I try to recreate that in my work.

We didn't use a designer but just worked with the foundation the house lends. We stripped the floors and rimu joinery, and knocked out a wall to make it open. Mark put the large skylights in each living room. I often work on the floor directly under the skylights. They throw lovely light. The colours in the room change all day as the sun moves.

The rug was a score from Trade Me for $25. I bought it to throw on my studio floor to protect it from paint but when it arrived I put it in here. The dining room table is African hardwood. We stripped it back then coated the top with polyurethane to make it kid-proof. I got the benches made by an old man who made outdoor garden furniture. I wanted them to be raw and rustic-looking. Benches around a dining table are perfect. You can always squeeze more people on.

Around the fireplace are old art deco tiles, original to the house. The mantelpiece is an enormous slab of kauri. I was so excited when I began stripping the layers of paint off that. The clock is an old find from an auction house years ago. I try to steer clear of fad interior trends, no matter how seductive. There are a lot of books in the room, mostly art books and I have my collection of early edition Charles Dickens and Daphne du Maurier books. I love the colours and textures of old books. They are precious. The big cat painting is Monday Night Moggy by Antony Warnes, of Tauranga, one of the most under-rated and talented artists in New Zealand.

The house inspires me for many of my pieces. I hang things around the place before they go off to galleries. When they go I create a new piece for that space. Many of the pieces on the wall in this room are part of a series I am working on of fairground pieces inspired by old circus and carnival posters. There's nothing PC about them.