REVIVED BY COLOUR
Bold tones and rich textures have transformed a gloomy Edwardian house
nyone who has tried house-hunting on a budget – and knows the bitter disappointment of discovering that the house that looks so perfect in the photos is actually built on the edge of a major trunk road – will appreciate the delight of finding the right house in the perfect location, at an affordable price. For Gemma and Gary Lewis, the relief was all the greater given that they had never lived anywhere for more than 18 months and were desperate to put down roots.
The couple’s work as investment bankers had kept them in London for more than 20 years. With two children, however, they wanted more space. After scouring Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent without success (“on our budget, there was always a ‘but’”), they worked their way down the A3 as far as Haslemere and found this detached Edwardian house on the Sussex-surrey border: “And amazingly it’s on a quiet, tree-lined road surrounded by beautiful countryside.”
In fact, it’s just on the edge of the South Downs National Park and on a road where no two houses are alike: a prefabricated timber and glass Huf Haus sits alongside a picture-postcard cottage, a Victorian villa next to a 1960s brick cube. Their own find, built in 1905, has a gothic look, with a steep double-pitched roof, pretty tiling and a wisteriaclad front, all hidden behind a wrought-iron gate. “There was something mysterious about it,” Gemma says. “As I walked up the path, I knew I’d be putting in an offer.”
That was five years ago, and since then the interior has been transformed several times over. As well as ripping out the bathroom and replacing the galley kitchen with a spacious new extension, Gemma has discovered a creative side that had been submerged by her 27 years of corporate
“To me, paint colours are like cushions – something to be changed constantly”
life. It started quietly enough: she initially painted the entire house in Farrow & Ball’s Purbeck Stone and laid grey carpets throughout, to provide a blank canvas. But this house, she realised, needed more colour: “It’s in a valley, so it’s naturally dark, which meant that grey simply killed it overnight. It needs warm tones.” Slowly, she brought the house back to life through colour, choosing shades that enhance the vintage finds and layers of texture she enjoys using, painting the main living room in a palette of rich chocolate, then adding brighter accents – copper-coloured fireplace tiles, mustard velvet curtains and sofa covers.
And her new-found colour confidence coincided with a new career. For the first year, she continued commuting to London, but knew she wanted more of an outdoor life with dogs and fresh air. “So I went and got myself a shop!” she says. At Wattle & Daub in Godalming, Gemma sells carefully sourced curiosities, layering new pieces with vintage finds. “It just encouraged me to experiment more at home,” she admits. “To me, paint colours are like cushions – something to be changed constantly.” And because she has become ultra-aware of the connection between rooms, the way colours flow from one to another, it means that if she changes one room she has to change the next, and the next… That’s how the kitchen, which leads off the living room, went through several incarnations before ending up dusky pink (a softer version of that chocolate) and green (matching the outsized grapes in a living room picture), with a yellow cabinet picking up the golds and ochres of the living room fabrics and a set of copper pans echoing the fireplace.
Gemma and Gary have undertaken all the work themselves, always to a budget and collecting ideas wherever they come across them. The green panelled wall at the sofa end of the kitchen is created from individual wood ‘shingles’,
inspired by a yoga cabin they saw on a trip to California. The blue sliding door, which originally opened onto the back garden, pulls back to reveal the entrance to the living room, while a companion door in pink conceals the utility room.
That sense of flow, of colours leading you from room to room, continues through the hall, where a patterned runner creates the effect of traditional encaustic tiles and picks up the dark Mulberry paint (by Craig & Rose) of the sitting-room woodwork. The grey carpets have long since been replaced by the warmth of wooden boards: engineered light oak planks downstairs, more of that deep aubergine paintwork on the staircase, and the palest pink (Faded Blossom by Atelier Ellis) on the upper floors. The four bedrooms continue the theme of strong, saturated colour: russets and golds complementing natural wood tones in
Gemma’s room, slate blue with deep lilac in her daughter Erin’s and a dark teal in her son Sam’s.
And everywhere you look are the individually chosen, precisely placed artefacts that make the house – and Gemma’s shop – so richly intriguing: the vase of faux berries that sits with two china dogs on the livingroom mantelpiece; the panel of patinaed metal on the wall and the jug of silver green eucalyptus sprays that echoes the wall colour behind it. She has always collected old things, but she’s now curating them by colour and season, and the effect is arresting. It looks random, she says, “but I rearrange things all day every day, so that I can sit in a chair and know the view is right.” But ‘right’ doesn’t mean ‘perfect’, she adds. “Just how I want it to be – there’s a difference!”
FOR MORE INFORMATION on Wattle & Daub, visit the shop in Godalming, Surrey, or the website, wattleanddaubhome.co.uk.
“Being in a valley, the house is naturally dark, so it needs warm tones”