The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Easy does it
Interior designer Nicola Harding has created a relaxed yet supremely stylish home for her young family by mixing up modern and vintage, colours, neutrals and pattern. By Elfreda Pownall.
Colourful, cool, rustic – the ideal family home
WHEN NICOLA HARDING and her husband Andy bought their house in west London nine years ago, it was a rabbit warren of tiny rooms, divided up into three flats, with two staircases. The couple camped in the top-floor flat with their newborn baby while workmen tore down one of the staircases and began to turn the place into a family home.
Harding, an interior and garden designer, has arranged the spaces to make them work for her family – and doesn’t subscribe to the view that openplan is best. ‘In London there’s a passion for being able to see straight through a house as you walk in,’ she says. ‘I feel that discovering rooms as you move through makes a house look bigger and more interesting.’ Her acute eye for colour combinations adds further style and character throughout.
Good storage is key to Harding’s design. ‘It allows the rooms to breathe,’ she says. A wall of cupboards off the hall, big enough to wheel a pram straight in, swallows up coats, bikes and Andy’s golf clubs, and a large walk-in larder has space for groceries, wine, kitchen gadgets (Andy is a keen experimental cook) and Nicola’s cello.
Four years ago, on a second phase of building, Harding brought more space and light to the kitchen area when she opened up the side return and installed a glass wall and ceiling, supported by wooden ribs painted blue. ‘They break up the glass, so you don’t have a huge black-mirror reflection at night,’ she says. ‘We wanted a softer, greenhouse feel, one that marries naturally with the period of the house’ (it’s late Victorian). There is a white leather L-shaped sofa in that corner, which, she says, ‘has had everything spilled and drawn on it’ by Sam, nine, Molly-mae, seven, and twoyear-old Thia, ‘and it just wipes clean’.
In the dining area, a custom-made ash table is surrounded by vintage chapel chairs, while reclaimed schoollab benches make up the kitchen worktops and central island, under which are shelves crammed with toys.
The more formal drawing room, at the front of the house, is a more colour-
‘I feel that discovering rooms as you move through makes a house more interesting’
ful space. ‘It helps to have contrasting vibrant colours in here – a more muted palette would look dreary,’ says Harding. Bright velvets – turquoise for the curtains, lettuce green and buttercup yellow for the armchairs – work well with the pink walls and the green geometric rug from The Rug Company. Two 1950s scarves – one by Dior, the other by Jacqmar – are framed in Perspex.
Harding’s design business started at an early age: as she set off for university in Edinburgh, she asked her father if he could advance her all the money he was planning on giving her during her four years there, in a lump sum. She used it as a deposit for a tiny flat, which, when she had done it up (on a shoestring) was greatly admired, and which got her work helping local people. Some of the junk-shop tables and lamps from her student flat are still in use in the main bedroom, where she has painted a huge black ‘headboard’ behind the bed.
The dressing room next door doubles as Andy’s study. ‘We wanted a space for our clothes and somewhere
Andy could work late at night,’ says Harding. ‘I like to go to bed early, and for him to have his laptop in bed would not be settling. This is a good solution: he’s not isolated in another part of the house, and we can chat.’
In the bathroom beyond, a colourful mural has been painted above the bath, and a small stool, another junk-shop trophy, is where Harding sits to wash the children’s hair.
‘In a hotel, every inch has to pay its way, and it’s the same in a home’
She stresses that this is a family house, not a showpiece, but her commercial projects (including the Beaverbrook hotel in Surrey and the new Rose Hotel in Deal) cross-pollinate her work in private homes, including her own. ‘In a hotel, every inch has to pay its way, and it’s the same in a home,’ she says. ‘It’s no good just making it look nice; it has to work, and most of all to feel nice.’