detached
villa
Interior architecture
CITY | HAMPSTEAD GARDEN SUBURB
A complete reworking of a listed villa, achieved almost entirely without structural change: a hundred small decisions, none of which announces itself.
LOCATION: Hampstead Garden Suburb, London
PROJECT TYPE: Full house interior design. Colour consultation, spatial planning, bespoke furniture and joinery, lighting redesign.
SCOPE: Interior Design · Colour and Fabric Consultation · Spatial Planning · Bespoke Joinery and Furniture · Lighting Design · Art Sourcing · Upholstery
A young professional couple had lived in this substantial listed property for a couple of years and never found the time to truly make it theirs. A lovely, spacious home in one of London’s most architecturally protected neighbourhoods, and yet slightly unwelcoming: beautiful in its bones, but unfinished in its feeling.
The challenge here was not scope but precision: a full reworking of the house achieved almost entirely without structural change. No walls came down. Instead, every room received a carefully considered set of interventions: paint, wallpaper, fabric, lighting, joinery, window treatments, new and reupholstered seating, repositioned furniture, rehung doors, closed windows, added panelling. The cumulative effect of a hundred small decisions is a house that feels completely remade. No single intervention announces itself. Together, they change everything.
The signature of the house is a blue and yellow palette, running from the deep inky blue of the staircase to the soft sky blue of the family room, and a French country-house informality threaded quietly through the historic English architecture. Some of the clients’ own furniture was kept and upcycled, antiques were integrated, and the whole was woven together so that the new and the old read as one.
THE BRIEF
The task was to bring the informal elegance of a French country house into the historic English architecture of a listed property in a conservation area, working closely with the clients to fold their existing furniture into an entirely new scheme of colour, wallpaper, fabric, joinery, upholstery and substantially altered lighting. We worked with what was there. We improved what was not working. And we made it feel like them.
This is the most demanding kind of brief. Not a blank canvas, but an inherited home with history, quality and existing pieces that deserved to be honoured rather than replaced. The ability to see what is worth keeping, what needs gently correcting, and how to weave the two together so that nobody can tell where the old ends and the new begins, is a skill that comes only from experience. It was at the heart of everything we did here.
“Claudia brought great value with her ideas throughout our refurbishment project. She is professional, has an eye for detail and works with a variety of suppliers. With her knowledge and experience she was able to make suggestions on design, colour scheme, furniture and furnishings — always keeping within our taste and preference.”
- Clients, Detached Villa — Hampstead Garden Suburb
Small Changes.
Big Results.
We are often asked what a designer actually does when there is no building work involved. The answer, in this house, is instructive. In the master bedroom alone, three interventions changed everything: the bed was repositioned, the entrance door was rehung, and a kinked wall, a minor but persistent irritation, was resolved by running a clean, straight line of built-in joinery across it. A room that had felt awkward became composed. Nothing structural was touched.
Across the house we added sympathetically to the existing architectural features rather than replacing them. New panelling went into the hallway and master bedroom. Redundant fireplaces and windows in the family lounge, study and dressing room were removed and closed, not as a loss but as a clarification. Each room became more proportionate, more purposeful, more itself. Silk paper was applied to the walls and dressing-room doors, for a quiet, luxurious continuity through the upper floor.
The lighting was substantially redesigned throughout. Light in a listed building is both a constraint and an opportunity: the existing fittings and circuits rarely align with how a family actually uses a space. The new scheme works with the architecture rather than against it, creating the layered, tuneable light that makes a large house feel intimate in the evening and alive in the morning.
The PALETTE
The colour story runs through the whole house in shades of blue, from the deep, moody inky blue of the staircase to the soft, airy sky blue of the family room, with yellow as its constant counterpart. The same hue at completely different registers gives the home consistency and elegance, with enough variation in pattern and material to stay stimulating, surprising and never dull.
Yellow appears as the counterpoint: warm, grounded, always precisely placed. Together the palette moves through the house the way light moves through a well-planned sequence of rooms, consistent in character, varied in expression. The blues of the bathrooms and dressing rooms echo the upholstery and joinery nearby. Nothing is accidental. The French influence is present not in pastiche but in sensibility: in the scale of a pattern, the quality of a fabric, the decision to source vintage furniture that had already earned its place in a room.
made, not bought
Each home should be a true reflection of its owners’ tastes, experiences and lifestyle, and we go a long way to source elements that are unique to them. Here we commissioned cast-brass door handles in the French style: a small detail, and also the detail every visitor touches. Vintage French furniture was found and selected piece by piece. A loveseat from the clients’ existing collection was painted and reupholstered to tie into the new palette.
For the dressing room, Claudia designed a brass-framed glass étagère, a display piece that is also a quiet argument for beauty and function occupying the same object. The French wardrobes were painted by hand in waxed and dragged finishes, each a small work of craftsmanship that rewards close looking. Nothing was discarded that could be honoured instead.
“The rooms that work best are the ones where you cannot see the work. That is always the point.”
CITY
Urban Sophistication
Surf
Coastal Serenity
Ski
Alpine Craft
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Every project begins with a conversation.
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