An interior designer's Welsh cottage, inventively furnished with second-hand finds
Lucinda Griffith sketched a plan on a paper napkin for the house in Denbighshire that the estate agent had just shown her. ‘I was quite vexed that the layout was so bad,’ she says. ‘Everything was in the wrong place.’ Longing to return to her roots, Lucinda made the move from London back to Wales 15 years ago and rented for four years before she found this house in sight of the mountain that had been the view from her childhood bedroom. It belonged to the head forester of the local Forestry Commission and had been given a going-over in the Eighties, with hollow fakewood doors, tiny skirting boards and slate floors replaced by nylon carpets in what she describes as ‘hotel red’. The house was also slightly too big for her needs and slightly too expensive for her budget. Reader, she bought it.
On her first night there, Lucinda broke down and wept: ‘I thought, “What have I done? This is insane.” Far from being insane, Lucinda is super practical. She had assisted Emma Burns (senior design director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler) on some very glamorous houses, but the aspect of the business that had always delighted her was practical organisation. ‘The logistics of getting these huge jobs from the client-meeting stage to a finished house are enormous and I loved that side of it,’ she says.
Having left Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, she resolved to offer a service for people who cannot afford an interior designer. ‘I provide the crossing point – it’s more of a chasm, in fact – between an architect and a designer,’ she explains. ‘Beware CAD drawings. They typically show sofas 70cm deep, instead of the more generous and inviting 1 metre, and baths at 1.6 metres rather than an optimal 1.75 metres. Buy a scale ruler and check every measurement. Most people embark on renovations with practically no help at all and vital decisions are taken by default – by the builder or the plumber.’ Lucinda sees her job as getting houses to work well, so that a door opens the correct way to make a room seem larger and everything, from bed linen to boiler, radiators to rubbish bin, is in the right place and the spaces flow.
Needless to say, all these considerations are amply served in Lucinda’s home, though it has been a patient – and often painful – journey. On a tight budget for what she calls her ‘second-hand house’, she has bought furniture and pictures at auction and on Ebay at bargain prices, found abandoned beauties on pavements, snapped up fabrics in sales and gladly accepted cast-offs from friends.
Every night, the moment she finished work, she made herself spend two hours stripping wallpaper (one room had eight different patterns of Anaglypta) and painting every wall and ceiling herself. One of her first projects was to build a capacious chimney breast in the sitting room in order to provide somewhere to site a stove, with a later lucky find of an antique French oak fire surround at auction.
The room is painted in ‘Amber’, an archive colour from Zoffany that she loves for its ambiguity. Its soft tones are taken up in a ‘nicely knackered’ Turkish rug, purchased from a Turkish website, by two sofas and especially by – the joy of her life – an ancient, very comfortable armchair (a cast-off, naturally), for which she has splashed out on a bold John Stefanidis fabric. The dining room next door has walls in Farrow & Ball’s green archive colour ‘Danish Lawn’. This creates a vibrant background for a narrow mahogany dining table and Hepplewhite-style dining chairs that Lucinda collected piecemeal, which have seats covered in a horsehair fabric rescued from an upholsterer’s dustbin.
The hall – once the site of the bathroom, which she has moved upstairs – is painted in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Setting Plaster’. It is an ideal colour, she says, for a place where it gets dark early in winter, as it is neutral by day, and soft and glowing at night. The colour continues into the kitchen, which she relocated from a lean-to. Here, a wall shelf in bright yellow and kitchen cupboards in Farrow & Ball’s rich brown ‘Mahogany’ provide a lively contrast. A small cloakroom nearby is papered in Neisha Crosland’s ‘Pollen’. ‘I had the sample pinned up on the wall under the mirror for three years until I could afford it, but it was so worth the wait,’ she says. The basin and loo in here were both bought on Ebay, as were those in the upstairs bathroom.
Lucinda created a corridor upstairs as, previously, the rooms had opened onto each other. The four-poster in her bedroom was, of course, also a bargain. Blue felt curtains, bought in an Oka sale, were cut to fit and lined with white shirting fabric that cost £3 a metre. ‘But never skimp on an excellent curtain-maker,’ she advises. She treated herself to a headboard in a glorious Jean Monro fabric. The yellowgreen of the walls provides a vivid foil for antique family furniture and a pink Welsh blanket on the bed.
The porphyry-hued spare room next door is Lucinda’s London bedroom reproduced and, since the eaves did not allow for a cornice, Lucinda made her own wall trim, cutting out scalloped shapes from sticky-back drawer-lining felt.
The testimonials on her website show how appreciated her work is. ‘I love the full interior design service – it provides inspiration for the rest of us,’ says Lucinda. ‘But I give people access to someone who isn’t selling them anything. It makes no difference to my finances if they buy the grandest fabric, or one from a market stall. I’m amazed and thrilled to see my cottage featured in House & Garden, as I’ve spent less than £7,000 furnishing it. It’s just paint and pot luck!’
Lucinda Griffith Design Consultancy: lucindagriffithdesign.com
Rachael Smith1/10
Rachael Smith2/10A shelf in Fenwick & Tilbrook’s ‘Goldcrest’ contrasts with dark painted units from DIY Kitchens.
Rachael Smith3/10The copper fish moulds above the fireplace, which houses an Esse range, are set off by walls in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Setting Plaster’.
Rachael Smith4/10Jim Lawrence’s ‘Barchester Double’ pendant light hangs over a refectory table and chairs passed on by a friend.
Rachael Smith5/10This has walls in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Danish Lawn’.
Rachael Smith6/10A Debbie Urquhart painting is flanked by brass candle sconces from Tinsmiths, which are vital during power cuts.
Rachael Smith7/10
Rachael Smith8/10Blue felt bed curtains from an Oka sale and lined with shirting fabric, and a vintage Welsh blanket.
Rachael Smith9/10A headboard in Colefax and Fowler’s ‘Livingstone’ terracotta linen tones with walls in Farrow & Ball’s warm ‘Porphyry Pink’. Lucinda found the animal head at Shepherd’s Bush Market.
Rachael Smith10/10
