Separate bedrooms and separate houses.

Welcome to the life of actress Helena Bonham Carter and her partner, director Tim Burton. I love these two. I love how they look like cast members of Les Miserable. I love that they’re quite bonkers and unashamedly so. Unique in a sea of celebrity-sameness.

In a recent newspaper interview promoting their up-coming film Alice In Wonderland (where the journalist noted that Helena’s teeth are very yellow and she drank several double expressos), HBC spoke about her relationship with Tim and the fact they live next door to one another, despite having two kids together:

When she was 30, she finally felt ready to move out of her parents’ Golders Green home. She stayed in north London, moving a few miles away to Hampstead. She’d had plenty of boyfriends, ­including Kenneth Branagh, but had never lived with anybody. “I remember I did think, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Mr Right moved in next door?'”

Eventually, he did. During the filming of Planet Of The Apes, the first time she worked with ­Burton, Bonham Carter barely talked to him. The only thing she remembers him saying to her is that he knew he wanted her as one of his apes, and that he had once lived in Hampstead and it was the only place in the world he’d felt at home. After the film was finished, when she was 35, they began a relationship and he bought the house next door. Actually, the two houses next door. They have two children, six-year-old Billy Ray and two-year-old Nell. ­Burton still lives next door.

….As for the domestic arrangements, they are just practical. He bought the houses next door because hers was too small for them to live in (the three homes were built as ­cottages for ­artists, each with one main room), and both need their own space. Now, she says, the split is perfect – she has one house, he has ­another and the children have the third to play in with the nanny. As she talks, she’s shuffling through the photos on her mobile phone, showing me pictures of the children, her mum and dad, Shelley the tortoise. “That’s Bill as a pirate for his pirates party. He’s so ­unbelievably patient. Nell’s two, she’s going to destroy everything. He’s­ ­introvert, she’s extrovert. He’s very tender, she’s much more traditionally masculine.”

Do she and ­Burton see each other much at home? “He always visits, which is really touching. He’s always coming over.” Does he have a key to her house? “No, the houses are joined. We have a throughway. Journalists think there’s an underground tunnel, gothic. It’s ­actually quite above ground, lots of light.” Do they sleep together? “Sometimes. There’s a snoring issue… I talk, he snores. The other thing is, he’s an insomniac, so he needs to watch ­television to get to sleep. I need silence.”

I know one couple who swears by having a spare room so one of them can sleep there when sick or just sick and tired of the other person’s snoring/reading/whatever.

What do you think?