With our Book Club series, we hand over the proverbial mic to our Experts—letting them share their work, thought process, and tips, all in their own words. The following is an excerpt from Salvesen Graham’s new book, A New English Style, published this month with Quadrille.

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An Edwardian vicarage in a picturesque West Sussex hamlet is the setting for this holiday home belonging to a young London-based family.

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The clients have a more modern, architecturally led home in the city and wanted somewhere they could escape to and invite friends for a quintessentially English weekend in the country.

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The house is typical of its age and location: neat and pretty but sturdy looking; flint-clad with brick detailing and white painted gables. In the 1980s, its size nearly doubled thanks to a large two-floor extension at the back. “It had been a family house for a long time and had a lovely feel,” Mary recalls. “That’s so important. Even if you completely change a house, its feeling will remain, as though it’s part of the building’s DNA.”

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Now reimagined, reordered, and redecorated, the house is perfect for how the family wanted to spend time there, and for all the hosting and entertaining. Flexible spaces were high on their wish list. The main living area, for example, is a double reception room that could easily have remained a large drawing room. Instead, it is a multifunctional, adaptable space where, at one end, a round table piled with books can extend into a dining table for 12. At the other is a comfortable sitting area where blousy chintz sofas sit beneath contemporary art. There is a card table in one window, while two armchairs huddle conspiratorially in another. “On a rainy day, you could have a few sets of people doing their own thing and they wouldn’t be on top of each other,” Mary says.

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“We run through a lot of scenarios in our head when we are designing a room,” Nicole explains. “How would it work at Christmas or for a party? Where would your elderly relative sit if they wanted to be with the family without being in the midst of the action? It is incredibly considered spatial design.” Another example of this can be found across the hall in the study, a handsome space decorated in rich autumnal tones. It is necessarily cosy and quiet; a place to concentrate. But fold open its half-glazed double doors, and it transforms into a more expansive room, with the bookcase in the hallway now acting as its fourth wall. It’s very clever.

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A newly decorated weekend house can, by its nature, take time to fill with the ephemera of life and to have the edges knocked off it in a way that feels lived in. Then again, that roughed-up, slightly shabby take on English decorating isn’t for everyone. The owners of this house wanted a fresh take on the country house style. “They were delighted to embrace chintz and florals and antiques,” Mary recalls. “But their taste is a bit more tailored and pared back. That’s one thing we’ve been happy to show clients: that you can still get elements of this traditional English look even if you don’t live in a dishevelled country house with piles of books everywhere.” What Salvesen Graham have delivered is a happy meeting place between the traditional and the modern: a freshly scrubbed and polished version of the country house style.

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In the kitchen, the practicality of a run of fitted units is offset by the inclusion of freestanding pieces that have a more farmhouse feel: an enormous prep-table-cum-island with attractive turned wood legs; a bespoke but antique-looking breakfast cabinet in a rich mid-tone wood. Mary and Nicole designed the Dutch-style, glass-fronted cabinet to hide the enormous fridge freezer the house needed, which would have otherwise added an unfortunate industrial element to the space.

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The bedrooms upstairs are decorated in a way in which guests can be in no doubt they are waking up in an English country house. One room is decorated in the iconic Bowood fabric by Colefax & Fowler. The daughters’ bedroom is equally exuberant: a classic chintz has been paperbacked and hung on the walls, used for the valance and canopy of the beds, the curtains, and to cover a skirted armchair. It has a wonderful fairytale quality to it. “A weekend house is for fun times and making memories,” Nicole says. “So, it’s nice to add a bit of theatre.” The main bedroom has a wall of cupboards where one of the doors opens onto an enormous bathroom. “It’s like a secret room—something magic.” Similarly, the walls of the children’s loo downstairs are hand-painted with scenes from The Wind in the Willows.

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Order Salvesen Graham’s new book for more inspiration, or book a consultation with Nicole and Mary to get personalized advice for your space.

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