Louisa Greville Williams still smiles every time she walks through the door of her Wiltshire home: ‘It’s like coming home to a warm embrace,’ she says. ‘It’s a house filled with my treasures and I love its quirkiness and colour.’
The designer is keen to extend that warm welcome to friends and family over the holidays. Her sons, George and Ned, now in their 20s, still live at home so, come Christmas, the house is filled with their friends as well as her parents who live in the village and are constantly popping in and out.
‘We like socialising and regularly invite lots of friends and families for drinks or dinner over the week or so between Christmas and New Year, and in the years I actually ‘do’ Christmas Day, we normally have another family for lunch, too. It’s the time in the year when I really have a chance to enjoy cooking and entertaining. Although next year I’m hoping to run away to somewhere hot!’
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With its six bedrooms and four bathrooms there’s no shortage of space, but it’s a far cry from the cramped 1960s/1970s bungalow Louisa bought back in 2011. ‘It was horrible in parts,’ she admits. ‘The previous owner had a joinery shop, hence the panelling and the detail on the stairs, which I love. But there were also ‘built-in’ beds and furniture everywhere, which didn’t always work, and there turned out to be annoying problems like rotten windows that slowed down renovations and ate up my decorating budget.’
Louisa had bought the bungalow with planning permission for an extension, but decided to take it back to the planning stage to create a more dramatic two-storey extension to the rear, which has improved the layout of the whole house. She cast a fresh eye on the original part of the house, changing rooms such as the bathroom and bedroom within her master suite. ‘It was quite bizarre,’ she explains. ‘The bed was built into the window where my bath is now, and most of what is now my bedroom was given over to a dressing room, including the two lovely big sash windows with the only decent view of the garden.’
Due to the necessary remedial work, the building and decorating didn’t always happen in Louisa’s preferred order. ‘In many ways I had to just throw things together, so it’s a very under-planned house, but it works,’ she says.
The furniture and accessories are a real mix of styles and eras, encompassing bric-a-brac finds, pieces Louisa has inherited from her mother and grandparents, and other gems hauled back from her travels; this is a house where traditional botanical prints sit happily alongside bright Bollywood posters, faded florals next to kilim rugs.
‘I really don’t get too precious about genres,’ she admits. ‘I choose things because I love them rather than to collect, per se. And, if it’s not auction finds, it will be something from a buying trip abroad where we’re filling a van.’
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Most of the sofas in the house are hand-me-downs that have been lovingly reupholstered. And when it comes to reupholstery, the fabric designers Louisa turns to, among many others, include Sarah Vanrenen, her business partner in Vanrenen GW Designs, as well as Penny Morrison. She is careful to mix things up, avoiding anything too matchy-matchy, and adds in cushions in vintage fabrics from the stash she has collected over the years.
It’s a design style she describes as traditional English country with a twist, although there are also many American designers whose work she admires as well: ‘They tend to be brave with where they put furniture and brave in their colour choices,’ she adds. ‘Because of the slightly chaotic way I’ve had to work here, this place is certainly more haphazard than anything I would do for a client, but the boys and I love it.’
The house had been painted white throughout when Louisa bought it, and the fabulous colour palette here evolved over time. Louisa gives a nod to her art training and the fact that her parents were great maximalists, covering every wall with paintings – a passion she has inherited – but, she can also be moved by the beauty of her surroundings.
‘Driving home one day I passed the most incredible field of yellow rape next to a green pasture, with a great expanse of blue sky above, and I knew right then I had to go home and paint the ceiling in the green sitting room yellow!’ The house is still a work in progress, she says. ‘It’s always changing, always evolving, it doesn’t stay the same for very long.’
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Year-round, Louisa fills the house with plants and fresh flowers, but she sees Christmas as an excuse to go ‘completely over the top’, gathering greenery and berries from the neighbourhood hedgerows and enlisting the help of her friend, local florist Claire Lloyd, who garlands the fireplaces and stairs.
‘I’m not that great at arranging anything bigger than a vase,’ she laughs. And as she prefers to decorate the house with real flowers and greenery, she tends to take it all down a little earlier than Twelfth Night. ‘It’s all looking rather droopy by then, which is rather how we feel at that stage!’
