Ashley Hicks reinvents the country house interior in a 19th-century villa in Wiltshire
Some people deny the existence of ‘post-baby brain’, but the owner of this house in Wiltshire is not among them. She had done up a couple of houses and was happily bringing up three daughters when, after the birth of her fourth daughter, she succumbed to this much-disputed condition of indecision and lack of confidence. Travelling to Wiltshire once a week to oversee the workmen at the house, to which the family was moving from London, she realised that something had to give. She telephoned the designer Ashley Hicks, as their daughters are close friends. ‘Like the gentleman that he is, he came to my rescue,’ she says.
The house is an 1820s villa, to which a ballroom was added later that century, with further additions in the Twenties. Ashley’s brief was to give character to the main rooms. ‘The owners had done a lot,’ he says. ‘The house was in a grim state when they bought it six years ago and when I arrived, the planning was well advanced. They also had an electrical scheme, though I insisted it should be changed. Thirty downlighters in a grid – ridiculous!’ Ashley does not suffer from indecision. The lighting in the hall was the first change he made. ‘There were empty niches and I thought why not fill them with light sculptures inspired by the standing stones at Avebury.’
As you turn right from the hall, you enter the drawing room, where the straw-coloured grasscloth walls are dominated by a huge convex mirror, like a gigantic stylised flower. There are elements of a traditional drawing room, but they have been cleverly subverted. The giant damask pattern of the curtains is in bright lime-green cotton, and the mirror is fun and quirky. This room shows the way Ashley solved his client’s dilemma: how to reconcile her irreverent sense of fun and love of mid-century design with the traditional feel of the house. Ashley has filled the bay window with a huge sofa, dubbed ‘the Sunday papers sofa’. ‘The aim in a family house is to make a sitting room the whole family likes to use, and not have the kids wanting to go off somewhere else,’ says Ashley. ‘That’s why I always put a cinema of some sort in a sitting room or library.’
Across the hall, the library, which also serves as the husband’s study, has a cinema screen concealed in a recess in an elegant bookcase. A sofa faces the screen, with a raised tier of built-in seating behind it, on a platform that conceals drawers full of DVDs.
Walking from the hall, through a vivid yellow corridor, you reach the quieter tones of the kitchen, where the family also likes to congregate. It was previously the Victorian ballroom and now has a dining area at one end and a seating area at the other, with a vast central kitchen island and units designed by Plain English. This room was the owner’s project and, after its dark panelling had been removed, neutral colours were chosen to create a calm backdrop for works by Gillian Ayres and David Spiller, as well as a couple of her own oil paintings. ‘This is a great room for parties – we’ve had 70 people sitting down in here,’ she says. Much smaller dinners take place in the dining room, where aubergine walls and polished mahogany table are lightened by Ashley’s gilded console tables and pictures of Popeye and Olive Oyl.
Ashley kept the main bedroom simple: a bed curtain wrapping round the headboard matches the window curtains, as well as the headboard and bedcover, which are trimmed with blue braid. He added bedside tables and two chairs of his own design, and the owner’s collection
of dog paintings hangs on either side of the bed.
The family’s own dogs range the garden that surrounds the house, a first glimpse of which is a new, minimalist stone-edged rill set in a lawn. The side of the house overlooks a steep and beautiful dell, planted in the Fifties with camellias, magnolias and rhododendrons; now giants, they stand amid carpets of snowdrops, wild narcissi and bluebells, and make this an enchanting place in spring. On flatter ground above, there is a rose tunnel and, beyond it, the designer Liz Sanderson has made a bee garden, with hives nearby, to extend the garden’s season into late summer. In an area once used for parking cars, beds of sedums, veronicastrum and nepeta swirl around a grid of young fruit trees, with a river of blue salvias running across the space. Indecision banished and the house complete, its delighted owner is forging ahead with this new project, but looking back in thanks to Ashley Hicks.
Ashley Hicks: ashleyhicks.com
James Merrell1/8By the front door are a stuffed anteater and Chinese terracotta warrior.
James Merrell2/8A portrait of King Carl XIV Johan of Sweden, with whom the family has a connection, hangs on one of the grasscloth-covered walls. The doorway next to it leads into the dining room
James Merrell3/8The bookcase has a recess to hide a cinema screen; the Fifties leather chair is from Glaisher & Nash.
James Merrell4/8The rich aubergine wall colour is from Dulux Trade
James Merrell5/8French windows lead to the garden.
James Merrell6/8The units at the other end of the kitchen are by Plain English
James Merrell7/8The wallpaper here is the same Philip Jeffries grasscloth as in the drawing room. The bedside tables are by Ashley, with lamps from Graham & Green. A collection of dog paintings hangs on either side of the bed
James Merrell8/8Farrow & Ball’s ‘Downpipe’ paint sets the rich tone in this room; the bench was designed by Ashley.
