A gloriously colourful Highbury abode decorated on a budget

As it is, the soaring proportions of the main living space, with its vaulted ceiling and window of glass bricks, give the space a loft-like feel, although India has taken the decoration in an entirely different direction. Colour is a major element. As India explains, “I didn't want to leave any walls painted white. I knew I had a certain amount of rooms to play with and a certain amount of colours I like, so I’ve tried to get them all in somewhere.” That has translated to a blue hallway–complete with red and white painted tented ceiling (an example of getting creative as India’s budget didn’t allow her to produce it with fabric), yellow bedroom, darker blue kitchen and a living room in ‘Setting Plaster’ with plenty of colours layered on top. The front door and window frames have been painted blue, the windows upstairs have red trims against the pale pink walls and there are plans afoot to paint decorative patterns on the spiral staircase to the mezzanine.

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Paint is certainly one way in which India has expressed her creativity while keeping costs low. The stairs from the ground to the first floor are painted in a darker blue than the hallway floorboards, with a painted scallop detail where the two meet. “Lots of successful ideas come from something going a bit wrong, I’ll be working on something, it goes slightly wrong and then I think it looks kind of cool,” India laughs when quizzed about the detail, continuing, “the scalloping on the bottom of the stairs happened because of a paint overspill on the bottom step, so it just worked to cover it up if I carried on and painted that pattern.” There’s also now a matching detail above the under stair storage hidden by a hanging suzani on the other side.

The hallway opens into the stairs to the first floor–where the living space is. A suzani curtain from the Pelican House hides a storage area and the blue in it is picked up by the Dulux paint on the walls and ‘Stiffkey Blue’ from Farrow & Ball on the stairs. The tall boy cupboard was a Kempton find and the small red rattan stool is by EJR Barnes.

Dean Hearne

While India’s talent with a paintbrush has certainly yielded brilliant results, the real showstopper moments link neatly to her professional talents. As Design Director at de Gournay, her day job is designing and drawing the brand’s highly coveted wallpapers, as well as looking after all of the embroidery. When she bought her own house, she set about scheming her own wallpaper designs just for the house, pairing them in places with de Gournay’s textural slub silk on the walls. In India’s bedroom, a yellow slub silk above the dado rail complements India’s own design–inspired by an antique Chinese screen–below. In the kitchen is a reimagining of a previous design based on Portuguese tiles, recoloured and designed to work in the small space, while the staircase has slub silk and then three panels of embroidered fish against the same background, framed in the centre to create a restful focal point.

That moment of rest is key, as most of the wall space in the house is covered in art. Not just any art, but a lifetime of collected pieces, most of which are by India’s own family. A grandfather and great grandmother were both painters, as well as India’s mother. Her bedroom contains mostly Asian art, which formed the inspiration for the yellow and red theme of the room, while the staircase and walls of the living space are occupied by a plethora of large scale landscapes by her grandfather, all framed in painted cornicing, still life paintings by her great grandmother and graphic pieces.

The theme for India's bedroom was drawn from her grandparents' collection of Asian art, which mostly lives in her bedroom now. The yellow and red colour scheme was the starting point, with a custom yellow dupion wallpaper by de Gournay above the dado and a custom hand-painted wallpaper design called ‘Mapi’ below.

Dean Hearne

Antique furniture further adds to the effect, with a particular penchant for “pieces that have a slightly unusual characteristic that you can’t pick up anywhere.” “I was never worried about the house having a single aesthetic,” India notes, “but I knew if I liked everything in it, it would work.” A jumble of pieces, colours, eras and designs doesn’t always work, but here, it really does. The overall effect is wonderful, spilling over with interest and creativity at every turn.