Edward Bulmer's painstakingly restored Queen Anne house is packed with witty details

Edward Bulmer was brought up in a pleasant Georgian rectory in Herefordshire, painstakingly restored by his father, where he intuitively acquired a taste for period buildings. After studying history of art at the University of East Anglia, and developing a passion for architecture, he worked in quick succession for interior designer David Mlinaric, then Gervase Jackson-Stops, who was architectural advisor to the National Trust, and later with Alec Cobbe, known for his rehanging of art collections in historic houses. With such an apprenticeship, it is hardly surprising that Edward is now an architectural historian and interior decorator of note, who is called upon when such mansions as Kenwood, Althorp or Goodwood are in need of help.

So it might seem axiomatic that his own charming Queen Anne house, also in Herefordshire, where he lives with his wife Emma and their three daughters, would be a yardstick for academic restoration, a perfect recreation of an eighteenth-century interior. But there you would be wrong. The house itself, enviably pretty in warm red brick, was built around 1700. 'Obviously a gentleman's house of the time furnished with all the then necessary appurtenances - dovecote, mixed farm and gardens (walled and water) - everything in fact that would allow the house to be self-sufficient and work economically, but all on a small scale,' Edward says. There remain a clutch of outbuildings and a cow byre, which, serendipitously, is now the busy hub of Edward Bulmer Natural Paint, of which more later. 'I love the fact that the house is a country estate in miniature, with the look of a much more grown-up establishment.'

Over the centuries, the house had been altered, windows blocked up here, a wing of domestic offices added there, and by the time the Bulmers arrived in 1994, it had subsided into a state of benign neglect. The first task, therefore, was to make it liveable by remodelling parts of the house, which has also restored its proportions. They did this primarily by demolishing the nineteenth-century side wing of domestic offices and replacing it with a new wing facing the walled garden to the west. 'I wanted to build this side to turn the house around and embrace the walled garden, and to create balance; we extended the footprint of the house by adding a garden hall, enlarging the kitchen on one side and creating the dining room on the other,' Edward says. 'And to balance the façade, we put back once-blocked windows overlooking the walled garden.' The new, generously proportioned garden hall, with its soft turquoise-painted walls and nineteenth-century flagged floor, as well as a cloakroom, with walls cheerfully hung with a Pierre Frey fabric, provide a practical but creative link to the two former wings of the house.

From the garden hall, the dining room now extends out beyond what was once an exterior wall and is quite formal. It is furnished with many of the antiques Edward collected in his early days as a decorator, with warm grey walls and curtains in a design specially made for Edward by Watts of Westminster. On the other side of the hall, the kitchen is a comfortable country room with a light-filled eating area, part of the newly built wing.

From the main east façade, the front door opens into a wide hall with a well-proportioned early staircase of oak. To one side of the hall is the family room, also panelled in oak; it is a very personal room with comfortable furniture, much of which was designed by Edward, and every possible inch of the panelling is hung with pictures by family and friends. As Edward says, it could be called The Bulmer Room.