vintage charm
A laid-back vibe was the key requirement for this family home, whose interior designer owner has balanced time-worn finds with the occasional designer treasure
‘Some people like to open out the ground floor of a house so you can see right through from the front door to the garden – but I disagree,’ says interior designer Nicola Harding. ‘I like the idea of going on a journey.’ The journey in her west London Victorian house takes you through a narrow entrance hall to a larger hall space beyond, where discreet full-height cupboards swallow up everything from coats to children’s bikes and her husband Andy’s golf clubs. There’s an arch to the sitting room on your left, then you walk round the wall of the larder, through a short, narrow corridor, and the huge kitchen/dining/ living room beyond is revealed.
Nicola and Andy bought the house, which had been cut up into three flats, nine years ago and moved in on the day their eldest child, Sam, was due to be born. They lived in the top flat while the builders tore down two of the house’s three staircases and made the rest of the place habitable. ‘We did it on a shoestring,’ she says.
Four years later they embarked on a second batch of building, when they enclosed the side return to enlarge the kitchen area. ‘The kitchen faces north, and previously didn’t have much natural light to speak of, so it made the world of a difference,’ says Nicola. She broke up the areas of glass with painted wooden beams. ‘We wanted a greenhouse feel, something that would work with the period of the house.’ A white leather L-shaped sofa now fills that area. She designed the kitchen using reclaimed school laboratory benches for the worktops, with open shelves for cookery books. Andy is a keen experimental cook, so they made a larder behind the kitchen, with storage for gadgets, as well as wine and groceries. The wooden ‘bead and butt’ walls of the larder are painted in the Paint & Paper Library’s Blue Gum; it’s a colour which appears in other parts of the house, too. All of the floors in the house are painted white to reflect light and make the colours on the walls sing out. The living room at the front of the house is a darker space, and Nicola has used strong vibrant colours for its velvet curtains and furniture.
When she was leaving for The University of Edinburgh, Nicola asked her father to give her all her living money for the four years in one lump sum. She used this as a deposit for a small flat. She decorated it, made it look terrific and furnished it with local junk shop finds. Some of these pieces are still with Nicola in this house. The dressing table in the master bedroom was another Edinburgh find, and here Nicola painted a ‘headboard’, adding a bright throw and cushions. A light balsa-wood box on the opposite wall is covered in a Seventies Svenskt Tenn fabric to conceal the television.
‘In my design studio we interrogate our clients to find out exactly how they like to live,’ says Nicola, and at home, in the room next to the main bedroom, she has combined a dressing room with Andy’s study. He works late, while she likes an early night. They can chat when they want to, so it works for them both. The walls in there, once again in Blue Gum, make a good background for Andy’s sporting photographs, a burnt orange armchair and a vintage former haberdasher’s cupboard. The bathroom beyond has a mural by Marion Rhoades, inspired by the Svenskt Tenn fabric in the bedroom.
Nicola loves searching for vintage bargains, and she has been clever at mixing cheaper and designer pieces – the bathroom and children’s rooms have bright Swedish rag rugs, while in the main rooms rugs by Vanderhurd and The Rug Company provide a focal point. ‘The budget is all-important for my clients, where every square foot has to earn its keep,’ says Nicola. Her team has just completed the cool new The Rose hotel in Deal, Kent, and The Garden House at the Beaverbrook hotel in Surrey. At home the same applies. ‘But this is a family home,’ she says, ‘and not a showpiece!’
For more information about Nicola’s interior design work, visit hardingandread.com