Nylon: Laura Marling

Laura Marling opens the door to her East London home and deposits me in her living room—all Victorian-era floorboards, sunken sofas, and shelves of books (“in color order,” she says with a laugh)—while she fetches tea from the kitchen. Marling has only recently returned to this house, which she’s owned for six years, after two and a half years living across the pond in Los Angeles. It’s studded with the things she loves: those aforementioned tomes; her guitars, two of which are suspended on a wall next to an enormous human anatomy poster; clusters of wild flowers; and her art. A bicycle is propped beneath the bookshelves, and a laptop glows under one of Marling’s most beloved possessions: a framed print of the words Amaze Balls.

“It’s one of my favorite things of all time,” she says, smiling at the print and handing me a mug of tea. Fresh-faced and pixie-cropped, she pads across the room in ballet flats, sits cross-legged on a sheepskin rug on the floor, and asks, “Do you mind if I smoke?” It’s a habit she’s trying to “shake off,” she says, clicking a lighter.