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Country Life

Secret address book

Compiled by Arabella Youens | March 2017

You’ve just bought a country house and now you’re faced with the business of restoring and enhancing it-and possibly knocking it down and starting all over again. Or perhaps you decided that the house you’re in Isn’t fulfilling its potential. Who are you going to call? Country life gives you the top 100 architects, interior designers, builders and garden designers who have the knowledge and experience to create the rural retreat of your dreams.

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Lucy Elworthy

A designer blessed with an exceptional eye for colour and pattern as well as an ability to track down unusual and eclectic pieces.
They say ‘Lucy has an innate perception, empathy and understanding to help create a style that fits a clients personality’
We say ‘married to architect John Comparelli with whom she often collaborates creating a rare and winning double act’
07957 693246; www.lucyelworthy.co.uk

The Sunday Times

Britain’s top 30 interior designers

Katrina Burroughs | May 12 2013, 1:01am, The Sunday Times

Tired of manicured monochrome? Colour and character are back. Here is our pick of decorators who dare to be different

Ever thought of getting in a professional interior designer but worried the result would be like living in a showhome? You are probably right. In the boom years, many decorators aspired to work for luxury developers, and more recently have targeted the influx of foreign investors in London’s super-prime postcodes, so the trade has gained a reputation for the type of intercontinental, manicured monochrome that these clients, who have multiple homes, love.

Giles Kime, deputy editor of Homes & Gardens and deep thinker on the subject of decor, says: “The seamless join between interior design and property development has spawned a polite, homogenous style that is more about investment than inventiveness.” But that, Kime adds, is only half the story. While it’s still possible to commission a domestic interior that resembles a hotel lobby in Dubai, the design of easygoing family spaces, full of colour and individuality, is flourishing again. “There’s a new generation of designers — as well as stalwarts who have stuck to their guns — injecting schemes with a spirit that focuses more on the tastes of their clients and issues such as craftsmanship and sustainability.” So, in honour of this revival, Home has identified the top 30 designers who are doing inspiring work in real homes.

Let’s say some of the pictures on these pages tickle your aesthetic fancy. The rooms look casual, effortlessly pulled together, artfully cluttered. Why would you pay a decorator for something that looks simple enough to do yourself? Sue Timney, designer of interiors and textiles and president of the British Institute of Interior Design (BIID), the decorators’ professional body, says: “We are incredibly creative as a nation, but being creative isn’t the same as getting a good interior-design job done. People start a project and find they get stuck and give up, or call in a professional, because an amazing amount of the job is technical or boring. The average homeowner might not want to work with the builders consolidating health and safety issues.”

She adds that there are safeguards for those using a BIID designer: “Our members are professionally qualified, have years of experience and high levels of insurance. If a client isn’t happy, they abide by our complaints procedure.”

Money is the real issue for most of us. An interior designer is only an option if you have a job in mind, and a sum of money reserved to carry it out. Apart from the folk in our Best on a Budget section, few decorators will work on projects with a value below £25,000. But if you have a substantial makeover or alteration to achieve, a good designer will anticipate and avoid the common but costly pitfalls and squeeze out the last drops of value from your cash, through canny sourcing and use of trade discounts. “Even with a low budget, a designer can save you money and a lot of heartache,” says Timney.

Read Full Article on The Times Online

Lucy Elworthy Iterior Design Sunday Times

Lucy Elworthy
The pitch “Passionate about colour, texture and pattern, especially Indian hand-block prints, the fabrics of Robert Kime, Penny Morrison and Kathryn Ireland.”
Our take Elworthy’s mix of handcrafted, vintage and contemporary furnishings with her beloved textiles results in serene and stylish interiors.
Projects Specialises in second family homes, and country houses. Projects range from advising on paint colour and upholstery to sourcing all furnishings to fill a second home, as well as complete refurbs.
Clients The down-from-town set. CEOs and company owners, corporate investors and management consultants.
Budget From £5,000 to £500,000, or can charge an hourly sum or a fixed fee.
Location Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Devon, Hampshire and London.
Contact 07957 693246, lucyelworthy.co.uk

Lucy Elworthy Interior Design - Sunday Times

Country Calling

Lucy’s World of Interiors

Sitting in Lucy Elworthy’s lovely 16th century Wiltshire home I’m struck down by kitchen envy. It’s perfect but not in that overdone bling modernism of so many of today’s kitchens – more in an understated, actually I want to copy everything kind of way. The blue of the tongue and groove, for example, is exactly the colour I’d like for the woodwork in my own kitchen.

‘I lived with a few greens and blues before deciding on that one (it’s Light Blue from Farrow & Ball),’ Lucy says. A perfectionist, with a passion for textiles and antique furniture, Lucy has just been named one of the Sunday Times’s top 30 interior designers in the UK. Since the benchmark for selection was designers who create daring living spaces that are also easy to live with, I can see why Lucy Elworthy made the cut. Her style smoothly encompasses ancient and modern, old houses with white walls, ikat textiles, beautiful antiques and cutting-edge lighting – a classic, cool yet eminently comfortable blueprint which seems to transform everything from manor houses to the tiniest country cottage. A former stylist and decorations editor for House & Garden, it was only when Lucy bought and restored an Elizabethan farmhouse in Tisbury with architect husband John Comparelli, building up an enviable black book crammed full of West Country contacts in the process, that she decided to become an interior designer. Since then she has worked on many projects including a contemporary house in Cranborne Chase, a Queen Anne house in Gloucestershire, a Jacobean manor in Oxfordshire and a pretty cottage in East Knoyle, trawling antiques fairs and auctions, sourcing fabrics, finding furniture, lighting and paint colours and always with her trademark stamp, which combines stylishness with a sort of less is more, lo-fi easy living. You wouldn’t walk into a room designed by Lucy and think, ‘it looks fantastic but I daren’t sit down.’ She says: “I love texture and soft colours, old linens, early English and French furniture with very simplistic forms.’

Most recently she oversaw the complete renovation of an exquisite Devon longhouse, a blank canvas with a backdrop of character and fine old architecture, which, she says, ‘ was a dream job.’ She and her client sourced every stick of furniture – much of it from antique shops in Honiton and the Decorative Antiques Fair in Battersea. She filled the walls with paintings from Tom Hammick, one of Lucy’s favourite contemporary artists, found beautiful rugs from Vaughan, vintage sunburst mirrors (something of an obsession, I suspect) and exquisitely simple ceramics.

Looking at photos of the end result, I am reminded of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge a wonderful arts and crafts house where the plain-ness offsets rooms full of treasures. Talking of which, Lucy seems to have that magpie ability to home in on bargains, recognising their inherent beauty and value before anyone else. A lovely painted armoire in her daughter’s bedroom, bought for a hundred pounds is a case in point. it bears the name Zuzana Bartos and scribbled inside the dates 1893 and 1903. ‘I like to think a Hungarian circus performer used to own it,’ she says.

Read Full article on Country Calling