A comfortable, welcoming house perched on a secluded hilltop in the Chilterns
How often do you think about the depth of a house? For interior designer Taline Findlater of Olivine Design, it was the unlikely characteristic that made her fall for her Oxfordshire family home. Perched atop a broad Chiltern hill, the long, narrow house is only a room deep in most places, meaning the 60-mile views over the rolling landscape were visible from almost any point in the building. “It doesn’t matter what side of the house you’re standing on,” Taline explains, “it’s got this amazing view out of it.” Looking for a larger place to live in for herself, her husband, her three children and their two dogs, she knew she had found the basis of her future family home.
Taline bought the house a little more than three years ago, and immediately set about modernising it. Set amid a Christmas tree farm near “a tiny little hamlet”, the house is a sort of low-level secret; “You wouldn’t know it was there,” Taline explains. “When you turn up on one side of the house, you don’t know what’s out the other side of it.” Its oldest section was built in the 17th century, when Taline likes to believe the original builders deliberately elongated it to take in more of the view.
With the old, linear structure, though, came pitfalls. The house “hadn’t been touched for 60 years,” when Taline bought it, “which was fantastic because about 90 per cent of the people looking around it were completely put off.” Naturally, then, it took some time to whip the structure of the house into the shape Taline wanted (“The layout is everything,” she notes of successful interior design). And so the plumbing and electrics were replaced, as were some windows and the insulation, and four smaller rooms – a kitchen, utility room, downstairs loo and a large larder – were knocked together to make a considerably larger family kitchen. A new boot room and hallway space emerged to replace a small lean-to shed in the garden, and Taline added a new downstairs loo and utility room to the end of the house to replace the lost ones – and make the building even longer. She also added in new doors where before there were windows, to better integrate the garden and the house. “It was like a blank canvas,” she says.
And then they found the asbestos. “That was lovely,” Taline jokes. Digging under the kitchen to put in underfloor heating, builders uncovered pipes lagged in asbestos running throughout the entire ground floor; the site was shut down for a month and a half while “the guys with white outfits and tents came in and dealt with it.” Once that had been sorted, though, she could move on to the process of decoration.
As a trained fabric expert, having studied textiles at university, Taline was most excited to start choosing finishes, patterns and colours for her house. “It probably wasn't where I should have started, but I was straight into my fabrics and my colours very, very early on.” She cites everyone from Josef Frank and William Morris to Ben Pentreath and Beata Heuman – “She has an amazing attention to detail” – as inspiration, as well as the “folk-arty” textile designer Nathalie Farman-Farma of Décors Barbares. “I love all her textile designs. She works from Central Asia and Russia.”
More idiosyncratic decorative notes stemmed from the fact that the previous owners of the house were artists themselves. Above the Aga in Taline’s kitchen are eight painted tiles which were painted by the previous owners’ children – views of the house’s garden and pond and other scenes that are directly intertwined with the character of the house. Taline’s predecessors insisted she keep them when she moved in (she had offered to return them), and she incorporated them into the kitchen, carefully chiselling them off another wall with her builders’ help and installing them in pride of place in the kitchen. Elsewhere in the house, the earlier owners had painted “a massive mural of a cockerel” on a bathroom wall, which she also kept in situ. In this way, a through-line of the house’s recent history began to take shape.
Touches like the retained tiles and mural point to Taline’s philosophy of design, which is essentially relaxed and humane. Like Nancy Lancaster, who famously believed that a room that was too curated became uncomfortable, as though one was sitting in a museum, Taline is wary of a space looking too put-together. “The beauty in people can be seen in their imperfections; I think the same goes for the design of a room.” What she is too modest to point out, of course, is that making a room look relaxed and perfectly imperfect can, of course, be harder than creating an austere space.
Taline’s favourite space in the house is a hallway that she can turn into a large dining space when need be. She removes a smaller, round table from in front of the 17th-century fireplace, and lays out on trestles “a massive piece of MDF wood” that the builders cut her, transforming it into a warm dining room for major events like Christmas. There’s something authentic and honest about the whole idea; as Taline puts it, “I feel like we’ve bedded ourselves into it quite well.” All the disparate elements of the house combine in a laid-back yet stylish scheme to make it feel like a long-established family home – one lived in for more than just the three years they have been there. Doubtless they’ll be there for many more to come.
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Simon Brown1/21The family dogs, Rolo and Bear, in front of Taline Findlater’s Cotswolds house.
Simon Brown2/21The children’s paintings hang above the door to the right in the entrance to the house. The wreath over the door into the kitchen is by Layla Robinson, made from dried spring flowers.
Simon Brown3/21The doors are painted in ‘Blazer’ by Farrow & Ball. The clock is from Ikea, and the rug is from Penny Morrison.
Simon Brown4/21The tiles above the Aga were painted by the previous owners’ children. “We hope to add to them one day,” Taline says.
Simon Brown5/21
Simon Brown6/21The table was made by a friend, and painted in ‘Green Smoke’ by Farrow & Ball. The carver chair is a hand-me-down from Taline’s parents, and the cabinets are painted in ‘Lead’ by Devol.
Simon Brown7/21The wallpaper in the foreground is ‘Sunburst’ in green by Robert Kime; it runs up the stairs.
Simon Brown8/21The sitting room is a relaxed space, filled with the fabrics Taline loves.
Simon Brown9/21The desk was inherited from Taline’s husband’s side of the family.
Simon Brown10/21The sofa came from the Watlington auction house and Taline had it covered in grey linen from the Cloth Shop. The cushion fabric is ‘Manousk’ by Robert Kime, and the curtain is ‘Aryan Chota’ by Namay Samay.
Simon Brown11/21The armchair belonged to Taline’s father-in-law, and has been reupholstered in discontinued wool satin by Turnell & Gigon. The lamp base is by Vaughan and the shade is from Fermoie. The bench in front of the fireplace is from the Swan Antique Centre in Tetsworth.
Simon Brown12/21In the hallway, which serves as a dining room at certain times like Christmas, the round table is inherited from Taline’s grandparents. The curtains are in her “all-time favourite fabric”, ‘Josephine’ in Mink/Peach by John Stefanidis. The painting above the fireplace is by Anita Klein; Taline and her husband bought it at the Summer Exhibition.
Simon Brown13/21The mirror is from Robert Langford; the sideboard is from Chelsea Textiles and the lamp and shade are from Pooky. The art is by Peter Stilwell.
Simon Brown14/21The lamp is from Penny Morrison. Taline repainted the fireplace herself in ‘Bancha’ by Farrow & Ball. The side table was a gift from her mother.
Simon Brown15/21In the boot room, the pendant lamps are Espen Oversized Pendants from Cox & Cox. The table was left in the barn by the previous owner, and the rug is from an antique rug shop in Hungerford.
Simon Brown16/21The wallpaper in Taline’s daughter’s room is ‘Madame Ziggle’ in blue and orange by Ottoline. “It is quite a small room and out of all the rooms in the house it is the darkest,” says Taline. “I wanted to give it some light and cheer. The ceilings are low, hence why we painted the ceilings the same colour of the skirting, door and architrave – it gives it a tiny bit more height.”
Simon Brown17/21Taline designed the shape of the canopy and headboard. The outside fabric is ‘Folly’ in Orpington Blue by Veere Grenney, and the trim is from Samuel & Sons. The headboard fabric is wool from Nobilis, and the inside of the canopy and the valance are lining fabrics from Nile & York. The suzani is from Armenia, and the chair is from Taline’s husband’s grandmother.
Simon Brown18/21Curtains and blinds in Soane Britain's ‘Seaweed Lace’ and a frilled dressing table skirt add charm to the rest of the bedroom.
Simon Brown19/21In Taline’s son’s bedroom, the fabric on the shaped headboard and box pleat valance is ‘Moorish Maze’ in Carmine by Rapture & White. The chest of drawers are from an auction house that Taline painted herself in a colour similar to ‘Atomic Red’ by Little Greene.
Simon Brown20/21The wallpaper is ‘Catchwood’ by Ottoline. The bath is a Heritage bath painted in ‘Calke Green’ by Farrow & Ball.
Simon Brown21/21The basket is from Olivine Design’s own shop, and is produced in Ghana. The blind fabric is ‘Oahu’ by Anna Spiro.
