Octavia Dickinson's Battersea flat captures the essence of an English cottage

Rachel Whiting

Octavia Dickinson has achieved a very clever trick: she has conjured up a country house in the middle of London. The two-bedroom flat where she lives with her fiancé Harry is a confection of floral prints, pale-pink walls and squashy sofas; there are jugs overflowing with flowers and the walls are hung with pictures and plates. But peer through the sitting room window and you will not find endless fields with gambolling lambs. Instead you are more likely to spot a pair of feet marching along the pavement above or car tyres rolling past. This is a basement flat in Battersea, not a cottage in the Cotswolds.

As the plentiful paintings and prints on the walls attest, Octavia comes from an art background. Her father is the renowned fine-art dealer Simon Dickinson and her sister Phoebe is an artist. She interned at Marlborough Gallery in New York, and Sotheby's and Phillips in London, before working at Dickinson Roundell in London and New York and as an art researcher for the BBC. But having grown up on a diet of interiors magazines, when she heard about a job with interior decorator Cindy Leveson, she decided it was time for a career change. She went on to work with Flora Soames for a year before setting up her fledgling interior-design practice at the end of 2016.

Octavia bought her flat in 2014. 'It wasn't in terrible condition, but it was rundown,' she says. 'I bashed down the wall dividing the corridor and the sitting room, and added a tiny bathroom to the back bedroom.' Spread across one floor, with a narrow slice of garden, it is a compact space, but despite the anti-minimal aesthetic, it does not feel chock-full.

The front door opens into the sitting room, where Octavia has layered colour and pattern with the lightest of touches. The walls are painted in 'Setting Plaster' by Farrow & Ball. It is a delicate shade of pink without being sugary and is shifted up a gear by the magenta bookshelves. There are G P & J Baker fabric curtains, an ottoman designed by Octavia and a mix of inherited furniture and antique finds. 'I wanted to create somewhere I would never want to leave,' she says.

Octavia and Harry's bedroom is an inordinately comfortable space painted a pretty shade of blue. 'I fell in love with the Claremont fabric, which I eventually saved up for and had made into curtains,' she says. Another prerequisite was a high bed - the sort you have to clamber into - which she finished with a valance trimmed with a red border. It is a small touch that neatly accentuates the floral pattern of the curtains and illustrates Octavia's attention to detail.