Three 17th-century Cotswold cottages become a cohesive, colourful house

When Sophie and Gregg Wilson bought an old wisteria-draped house near Banbury in 2020 it was already very lovely. Consisting of three 17th-century farm labourers’ cottages, it just needed a bit of reordering to help make the spaces flow more easily. While the downstairs rooms had been knocked through long ago, part of the layout upstairs needed to be reconfigured to avoid the couple’s two children, aged four and one, having to access their rooms through their parents’ room as they grow up – an issue resolved by their architect and subsequently realised by their builders Zawislanski Ltd. It would take rather more work, though, for the interiors to reflect the family’s personality. ‘One of the things I really wanted was for the house to have a magical quality for the children,’ Sophie says. To help them achieve this, they called in their friend, the interior designer Nadine Finnegan.

After a 15-year career in public relations, Nadine had decided she was ready for a change and, in 2016, embarked on a one-year course at The Interior Design Institute. She soon set up her own studio, calling it Decurate Interiors – a portmanteau that nods to her love of decorating alongside her passion for curating antique finds.

‘The brief for this house was to go big on cosy and big on style,’ says Nadine. She accomplished this with a bold mixture of colour and print, and contemporary and antique pieces. The magical quality that Sophie was keen to introduce came by way of a well-hidden trail of hand-painted animals throughout the house by the illustrator Fee Greening.

The slightly odd layout of the conjoined cottages actually lends itself to the fact that Sophie and Gregg regularly have their extended family to stay. Originally, each of the buildings was a one-up, one-down dwelling with its own staircase. This means, for example, that Sophie’s mother’s room on the first floor can only be accessed from a staircase in the kitchen, offering a degree of separation and privacy. Nadine worked with Ben John, founder of interior architecture company Brachah Design, to create the kitchen, where a dining table juts out from an island into a built-in seating nook. The joinery is painted in ‘Sage Green’ by Little Greene Paint & Paper, offset by cheerful yellow paintwork on the door frame.

With this being a weekend and holiday house (their main home is in Hampstead), Nadine was starting from scratch when it came to furniture. ‘Each room began with an object and this really informed the story,’ she says. The starting point for the dining room was a 19th-century Anglo-Indian boneinlaid dresser and the framed suzani that hangs on the wall. ‘We wanted the room to feel well travelled,’ adds Nadine. The ceiling mural was inspired by the village of Pyrgi, on the Greek island of Chios, where houses are painted in geometric designs. The ikat-print fabric used for the seats of the dining chairs was the basis for the pattern, which was painstakingly painted by Ben, who worked with Nadine on the kitchen.

The sitting room at the far end of the house is the largest area and would originally have been the principal farmhand’s cottage. The two generous, comfortable sofas (a diktat from Gregg) in front of an inviting fire are from Maker&Son, with a club fender upholstered in Robert Allen’s ‘Big Cat’ fabric. Perhaps the real story in this room, however, is the stripes. There are thick ones on the wall (hand-painted because the surface was too wonky to be wallpapered), thin stripes on the ceiling in the form of beams and yet more on the ottoman upholstery. The scheme is more nature-inspired in the study, where Polly Fern’s ‘Diamond Tulip’ wallpaper makes an eye-catching statement. A garden trellis is inset into the ceiling above the chaise and cabinetry is adorned with Polly’s signature floral motifs. ‘The design is extremely bold,’ says Nadine. ‘Sophie and Gregg challenged me on many levels and I was happy to go on that journey.’