It was six years ago when Lucy Kellaway fell in love with the sweeping orange kitchen worktop in an extraordinary wooden house in Hackney, east London. She subsequently decided to uproot from her Victorian home in Islington, north London, leaving her husband and decades-long career as a Financial Times columnist to become a secondary school maths teacher. As it turns out, the extravagance of the striking orange feature that stretched the length of the open-plan room, and its curve that leads the eye to a goldfish pond in the nearby garden, was exactly what she needed to drive that transformation.

Lucy’s home, bought through The Modern House, won a RIBA award for architectural excellence. It was designed by architect and former resident Marcus Lee in 2008. With its intriguing angular frame and modern material palette of predominantly Siberian larch and glass, Lucy describes the space as having a personality stronger than her own. Here, she feels little need to imprint her identity on her surroundings, something that felt necessary in her previous homes. Perhaps crucially, the light-filled, three-storey space comes with numerous writing spots, where she wrote her newly released book dedicated to the recent changes in her life – the cover of which is the very shade of orange that started it all. Here, as part of our series Checking In, we catch up with Lucy about settling in her home and the simple yet remarkable relationship she shares with it.

Lucy: “All my life, I’ve tried to impose my personality on the place I’m living. That’s very necessary if your house is the same as everyone else’s; you desperately want yours to have unique qualities that reflect you. Here, I’ve been freed from that – there’s no way that I’m going to impose my personality because the house’s personality is stronger than mine. I’ve found a nice background for myself, a nice environment to be in.

“Back in 2015, I hadn’t even heard of The Modern House – which was extraordinary because I love property porn. One day my daughter said, ‘Mum, look at this. There’s this house I think you’re going to love.’ I had no intention of buying it and went to see it just for fun. But when I entered and saw the orange countertop, I thought ‘I have to live here.’

“It wasn’t just the colour, but the combination of the orange and the length of it. It seemed so extravagant, like nothing I had ever seen. It stretches the full length of the room and then curves down to the pond at the end with orange goldfish in it. It’s really unusual and beautiful – and so uplifting!

“I felt like I was falling in love with someone, complete infatuation. It seemed very irrational at the time – I often say to people that I’m the only person in the world who left my husband for a 20ft strip of orange Corian. But this thing that I thought was impossible all this time – moving house, breaking up my family, changing my job, and reinventing myself – turned out to be quite easy in the end.

“I think where you live has a profound effect on you. When I moved here, I was fed up with my life, but didn’t realise it. There was something about this space and the way it flows that has a freeing effect. I realised that I didn’t have to be a newspaper columnist my whole life and that I could do something much bolder and different – the house inspired me to do that. Victorian houses are all exactly the same. This isn’t like that at all. It doesn’t even feel like it’s in London. The architecture doesn’t confine you, and I love that. Six years in, I still feel that way.

“I painted the outside black, which is beautiful and better for the longevity of the house since it helps prevent the wood rotting. I also changed the garden but kept the basic outline because it echoes the house. The decorative changes inside have been very small because I think it was built as it is meant to be. I respect the integrity of the house.

“One of the lovely things about the house is that it’s very accommodating. I had masses of Victorian furniture in my old place and things I’d inherited from my parents. I had already given my old Victorian table and chairs to my sister and bought the Ercol table and chairs before moving. There was nothing I brought from my old house that I felt I had to get rid of, it all looked perfectly fine in here.

“My art means so much to me. There’s a drawing here by a modern Australian artist that my mum, who was Australian, bought. My mum loved interiors and she wallpapered our sitting room bright yellow in the 1960s. Then she thought, ‘that’s too bright’ – so she bought that huge grey charcoal drawing of three girls. I thought it was the coolest thing when I was six years old. When I bought this house and looked at that wall, I thought, ‘at last, the perfect home for that drawing.’ It was one of the things that made me want to buy the house.

“There are lots of different writing spaces here. There’s my on-a-deadline space, which is right at the entrance. There’s my ‘I’m just working all day at home, I’m not really in a hurry’ spot, which is the dining table by the pond, where there’s lots of light. If the house is full of people, I work right at the top. It’s amazing to have so many different workspaces, especially during lockdown, when there were three of us – me and two of my children – living and working here.

“It’s incredible having the garden connect to the interior. The floor tiles are the same inside and outside, with no change of level, so you can just drift out. Eating outside is as easy as eating inside. As soon as the weather is nice I’m outside. I love gardens and this is the first house I’ve lived in that has got that relationship right.

“The bath is definitely my favourite place in the house. I have a bath every single night of my life. At night you can see the branches of trees through the glass roof. It’s a temple of calm and however difficult and tiring the day has been it’s such a lovely thing to do.

“I’ve become so house-proud, always pleading with people to come over because I want to show off my lovely home. I’ve definitely become more hospitable. My 60th birthday party here was fantastic. I’m also very happy to be here on my own, too. I relish the times when I am on my own, in fact. It hardly ever happens, but when I am, I don’t feel like I’m in a house that’s too big for me.

“This house has a lot of little surprises, which is partly to do with the light, which changes throughout the year. Winter is much lighter than summer because there are no leaves on the trees. It’s also different at different times of the day.

“I was also really surprised by the fireplace. In winter, I move all the sofas around the fire to create a real cosy feel with lots of low lights – even in a house that’s this big with this much glass. That was a delightful surprise. I had a bolt of love at first sight, and it hasn’t faded. It’s still a magical place to be.”

More about Lucy’s story can be found in her recently published book, Re-educated: How I changed my job, my home, my husband and my hair by Lucy Kellaway, published by Ebury.