All interior design has to begin somewhere. This sad scene is depressing to some, but is a challenge to the interior designer. This was obviously once a lovely house that has fallen into extreme neglect, but is only waiting for someone with inspiration to bring it back to life.
This is what I do. Barring serious structural deficiencies, which may have been a factor in the abuse of this poor building, one of the most magical challenges is bringing the once-beautiful back into its own.
Even if the structure is strictly past saving, simply recreating a beautiful interior – maybe using a totally different design – in the reconstructed shell of a fine old building is always exciting, because the outside form being necessarily determined the designer can give full rein to one of the supreme joys – creating a completely new design in a given outside shell.
Most of this page is given over to three designs for complete houses that I did as projects. All three have strong historical allusions and yet have a hint of modern too.
Featured Design: A Renaissance Chateau
This Renaissance Chateau was one of my earlier designs, and was inspired by the Chateau of Chenonceau spanning the River Cher. My design is clearly on a more modest scale with only a single arch, and a Long Gallery of more manageable proportions.
A particularly special feature of the design is the allocation of the two smaller of its four towers to be entirely Staircase Towers, containing nothing but the stairs giving access to all other levels. This can be clearly seen in the cutaway views.
It’s surprisingly difficult to get the proportions of this Classical French Renaissance period right – though so familiar, it takes a little practice to get the roofs correctly in scale to the rest of the building, and to get just the right degree of “batter” (the inward curving slope of the walls) and to get the dentillations under the eaves right. In the end I’m pleased with the result, which I set in Cotswold or Ketton (Northampton) sandstone, as a lovelier material than the whiter stone of the original.
The long bridge of Chenonceau over the Cher was actually built by the outstanding French architect Philibert de l’Orme.
For comparison, the rather more grand original appears below.
Featured Design: An Arts and Crafts House with a Classical Challenge
The style today known as Arts and Crafts dominated the last years before the First World War, and in bowdlerized form, has remained an inspiration to domestic architects all through the between-the-wars semi-detached drabness into being a significant influence in the myriads of “closes” and “ways” of modern estate housing.
Its legacy is a very sad one, because it was a quintessentially beautiful, and supremely domestic style. As Peter Davey in the definitive new Phaidon book on Arts and Crafts Architecture says, these buildings are so attractive and so appealing to live in.
The Arts and Crafts Movement was not a coherent whole but is the modern label for many strands of aesthetic exploration that were a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Naturally, most of these experiments drew on historical paradigms as in the works of William Morris and his belief in a return to the mediaeval guilds.
But many people today see the American engineer-architect Frank Lloyd Wright as an Arts and Crafts protagonist.
In this design I take inspiration from the man whom I believe to be the finest exponent of the entire movement, Sir Edwin Lutyens. In particular, although this house has a primarily English “cottagey” feel, I attempted to experiment with something Lutyens achieved brilliantly in a house at Knebworth, the combination of a Classical facade with a cottage-style plan.
Featured Design: A Grand Entertainment Venue
Still moving forwards in time, and yet not entirely, this design combines a Twentieth Century glass hall spanning two Eighteenth Century Classical pavilions.
The design was developed both with moderately large panes of glass and small ones, the smaller being more expensive – the whole project represents a very expensive construction – but more appealing.
Homage to White
This seems a reasonable place to acknowledge the extraordinary preponderance of white in modern interior design, and I give a selection of examples below. As an aficionado of Chrissie Rucker’s White Company, this is a look to which I’m not entirely averse, although my own preference has always been, and will remain, for brilliant Carravagian colour. These white interiors must either be a nightmare to keep clean or ideal to keep clean, depending on how you look at it.
