The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Interiors
Our 20-year passion project
Inside designer Sarah Nielson’s beautiful lakeside home
A life-changing accident gave interior designer Sarah Nielsen an understanding of the importance of well-being, and sparked a twodecade endeavour to transform an uninspiring 1970s bungalow into a warm, contemporary family home. By Serena Fokschaner. Portrait by Steven Barber
Unpleasant episodes can turn out to be valuable turning points, as interior designer Sarah Nielsen discovered. Back in the early 1990s, she was enjoying a singleton’s ‘work hard, play hard’ expat existence in Dubai, overseeing glossy residential projects for high-end clients. Then, in 1997, she was involved in a jet-ski accident. While emerging from a deep concussion in hospital, she had an epiphany. It was time to return to the UK and recalibrate her priorities.
‘The accident was a catalyst,’ says Nielsen. ‘It made me focus on life, health, and balancing work with my private life. I knew I had to rekindle my love of nature, and live somewhere I could hike up and down hills, and be outside.’
Nielsen is chatting to me, via Zoom, from her home close to Lake Windermere in Cumbria, which she shares with her husband Roger and their daughters, Emilia, eight, and Bethany, 15. She shows me glimpses of outside: the green fenland vegetation reflected in the lake water like a 19th-century watercolour. Inside, big, squishy sofas are strewn with woven cushions, pale linen curtains flutter at windows, and cedar surfaces glow in the winter sunshine. It’s the quintessential, inside-outside lakeside idyll.
Being here during lockdowns has been no great hardship either. ‘I feel guilty saying this, but it’s been wonderful to have the lake to ourselves,’ says Nielsen. A ferry takes you across the water, and a path skirts the 26-mile perimeter. ‘We’ve been able to cycle around the lake without meeting anyone.’
Twenty-one years ago, when the Nielsens were living nearby and first saw the former 1970s bungalow, it was less appealing. But shoreside boltholes, once beloved by the Romantic poets, are now sought out by cash-ready second-homeowners, and rarely linger on the market. ‘We heard it was coming up for sale, so we jumped in quickly,’ says Nielsen.
The single-storey building needed a lot of work and imagination: the exterior was lacklustre and pebble-dashed, while inside, panelled doors led off a long corridor like a faded motel. But that didn’t matter. For Nielsen, whose signature style is a cocktail of Japanese and Scandinavian influences, here was a chance to start again and design
a house rooted in the landscape: ‘Somewhere you can look at the sky and trees; a modern cabin in the woods,’ as she puts it.
They tackled the project in two phases. ‘With hindsight, it would have been easier to knock it down and start again,’ says Nielsen. ‘But my husband is a quantity surveyor, so he wanted to take things one step at a time.’
Step one was to rent out the house, while they applied for planning permission to remodel the interior to bring light and space to the 250 sq m footprint. A few years later, in 2005, the tenants moved out and the builders moved in. Down came the back of the house. In went new bathrooms in Cumbrian stone, a bright sitting room, and an open-plan kitchen and living space, which opens out on to the garden. Glazed doors inspired by traditional Japanese paper
screens subtly divide the study from the living space, adding to the weightless feel.
Then came phase two. In 2019, the family decamped to a nearby farmhouse while the builders returned to rip off the roof and add another storey. An ethereal, open-tread staircase floats up to the new floor, where there is a spacious family room, with full-height windows offering views of the surrounding trees. This has also become a space used for exercise by all the family, with extra time afforded by lockdown. ‘I’m addicted to Pilates, but often have had to skip sessions because of work,’ says Nielsen. ‘Now I have no excuse.’
Next door, a huge master bedroom suite was modelled on Nielsen’s favourite hotel, Sa
Pedrissa in Mallorca. The vaulted sanctuary-like space has all the things she likes to use in her professional work. There’s a cedarpanelled bedhead, pigeon-grey wardrobes and textural wallcoverings. The bathroom, with its stately tub, ‘is as open-plan as modesty would allow’, says Nielsen. ‘I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to lie here; you can’t hear a thing.’ She rarely uses curtains, but she did allow herself the ones here, made from a linen she had coveted by the brand de Le Cuona, which specialises in sustainable textiles.
‘When I started out, sustainability was never talked about; now, it’s all about the way materials are manufactured,’ says Nielsen, who recently designed six suites at the nearby Gilpin Hotel based on the principles of biophilic design, which promotes a connection with the natural world to improve wellbeing. She is also working with a local manufacturer to produce fabric woven from Herdwick sheep’s wool, which will be soft enough to use for upholstery.
Like those Romantic poets, Nielsen drew on the landscape for the palette that binds the interior. ‘I chose colours we’re surrounded by,’ she says. ‘White wouldn’t work, it would be too harsh; but off-whites do. Blue is too cold, but warmer tones like aubergine, rust and khakigreen are just right.’ Much of the furniture, like the oak kitchen table and the bar stools, came from her own homeware shop, in nearby Staveley. Clutter is not Nielsen’s style, but she did allow herself the ‘wall of life’ in the living room: shelving filled with family photos and books.
At Nielsen’s studio, where she has a team of six, everyone is ordinarily encouraged to leave their desks and head out for a walk at lunchtime. For her, trees, flowers and water are grist to the creative mill. ‘I’ll climb a hill, look down on to the lake and my heart leaps,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you need to stop, and reconnect with nature.’ nielsenhouse.co.uk