In 2016, Raven Smith jumped timelines. He got married, bought a new house, and quit his job at the video-sharing platform Nowness. Ten years later, and those big swings have paid dividends: he’s on his second critically acclaimed book, has gathered almost 400,000 Instagram followers, and he and his husband Richard ‘Dickie’ Danks recently welcomed their first baby, in their zany, art-filled terrace in southeast London, which they’ve renovated themselves. Raven has famously been 32 for several years now, so all this upwards momentum is an extra special achievement.
Now, it’s almost his dream home – ‘just two rooms short’ – and is packed to the rafters with decorations and design choices that exactly match his disposition: loud, witty and creatively chaotic. The kitchen is marmite, with its ketchup-red floor and mustard-yellow ceilings. A framed picture of Raven that appeared in the Financial Times in 2018 hangs in the hallway, under the soothsaying headline ‘We’re All Content Providers Now’. Toy skeletons lounge sardonically on bookshelves – unlike Raven, who is bouncing around like the light hitting his hallway playhouse mirrors. He has all the agility and charisma one would expect from an Instagram meme-master, his double-tapping fingers collecting little red hearts like tchotchkes. Being in front of the camera is meat and drink to Raven, who moves between presenting, authoring, being a Vogue columnist, a red carpet clothes horse and a considered pop-cultural historian with all the fluidity required for a diversified career in the post-mainstream media world. And now, he can add dad to the megamix.
Raven and Richard welcomed a baby just over a year ago, via surrogacy. ‘For some gay men, it takes a long time to have a baby,’ he says, and the couple has been planning it for some time – which, in the smallest of ways, has played into their design decisions. Years ago, they decided to put Toy Story-esque cloud wallpaper up on the walls of the second bedroom, which has a distinctly child-friendly air, though they could not make the mental leap to officially declaring it a kids’ room while their future parenthood status remained uncertain. ‘At the time, we thought the wallpaper could just about work as a fun guest bedroom,’ says Raven, but in the back of his mind, dreams of a children’s room persisted. ‘It’s not not a nursery,’ he remembers thinking, as the expectant clouds formed on the walls. In the end, the optimistic sky was a beautiful omen, and now, Raven’s one-year-old daughter happily practises her pareidolia under the peaceful sky. Completing the vision? A frankly massive T-rex. ‘People think the toy would be too scary for her, but she loves it,’ Raven assures me.
Unsurprisingly, Raven’s phone is frequently his tool of choice when it comes to both sourcing decorations and organising his eclectic inspirations. ‘I have so many screen-grabs of things that I like,’ he says. ‘They’re not necessarily all connected to making my house nicer, though it might indirectly inform this. They’re shots of what people are wearing, where people are going, scenes from movies I like…’ The camera roll then becomes an oh-so-scrollable rabbit hole; an alluring set of storefronts for the ever world-widening web. He prefers to shop second-hand and, for better or worse, the internet is filled with unusual pre-loved items to tempt and tease. Like his Ron Arad sofa, for instance, which he secured after setting up an Ebay alert for the designer. Dangerous. If anything, he’s worried his home will accidentally become ‘the house that Ebay built’.
His vibrant online persona is only one small part Raven’s story. His bread and butter is writing, which is a traditionally misanthropic pastime. ‘I spend so much of my offline time trying to be the most charismatic, witty, engaging person that I can be, on my own in a room silently typing,’ he says. ‘So I find it quite nice to be interacting with people constantly the rest of the time. I am social by nature. Writing is like being social, but on your own.’ This conversational tone gives an addictive quality to his writing, not least in his first book, Trivial Pursuits – covering essential topics like the social currency of height and whether three cigarettes counts as a meal – which zips along with a withering Millennial pathos. His second book, Men, takes an unflinching look at his own selfhood and masculinity, which might explain the curious ceramic eye sculpture that attentively observes happenings in his upstairs bathroom.
Some of Raven’s collecting strategies appeal to his quieter side. Many of his most treasured things are sourced in the most traditional of ways; heirlooms swiped from his own unsuspecting relatives, like a pair of leg-shaped nut crackers, pinched from his stepdad once upon a time. (‘If he hasn’t realised they’re gone, he will now…’, Raven jokes.) Or there’s the protuberant and kitschy shell lampshade that was given to him – willingly, I’m told – by his grandmother, which hasn’t yet found its forever placement, but sits proudly on a shelf nonetheless. The most significant item he’s forked out for himself is his dining table, which he powder-coated blue in home to David Hockney’s swimming pools. Ideally, he wants an actual Hockney pool in his house one day, but for now, the table will have to do.
The ten-year long renovation project is nearing its completion, if someone with Raven’s collector’s temperament is ever truly ‘done’. There are a few snags left to fix, but they don’t really keep him up at night. He would like more paintings, however. ‘But doesn’t everyone?’ he says, noting how success of his kind – in the media, adjacent to the sirenic worlds of fashion and luxury – has affected how he decorates and what he chooses to surround himself with. ‘I grew up really working-class and I can’t believe now I’m like, “Wow, if only I had some more paintings.”’ He pauses to reflect on what has been a jolly good decade. ‘The only time it’s okay to lie to your parents is when they ask how much stuff cost in your house,’ he concludes. Sage words indeed from our modern day pop-cultural chronicler. Save to favourites.
