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We’ve heard plenty of designers talk about the importance of balancing old and new, but sometimes that can be hard to picture. When we need a strong visual, we turn to the work of London-based firm Salvesen Graham. Its founders, Nicole Salvesen and Mary Graham, are part of a new wave of pros helping to push the boundaries of English style: They’ve created a bar skirt out of colorful flame stitch fabric, used rope as a staircase railing, and clad the walls of a formal lounge in green velvet. Fittingly, they titled their debut book A New English Style. Out May 6 in the U.S., its pages recap some of the duo’s most memorable projects, from a historic Georgian estate to a Craftsman-style home in Colorado. In this excerpt, author David Nicholls take us on a tour of a playful Chelsea house with no shortage of floral wallpaper and bed canopies.
This handsome townhouse on a quiet street in London’s Chelsea, home to a couple and their three children, is proof of how much can be achieved in a short period of time. It is also testament to the power of good decorating to create a dramatic impact in a space.
“This wasn’t a building project,” Nicole explains. “That was clear from the very beginning.” Their clients, who were relocating from California, had bought the five-floor Victorian house in July and needed to be in by September. “This should have been a two-year project,” she continues. “Yet it was done in three months.” What was required was excellent communication and trust between the designers and their client. “And honesty,” Mary says. “You have to be able to speak frankly with each other when decisions need to be made quickly.”
There was to be no structural work, nor architectural. That said, Mary and Nicole added some previously removed architectural detailing, which is most noticeable in the entrance hall. The space is surprisingly bright, with a gentle palette of blues and greens enhanced by plenty of natural light. The new square panelling establishes the soft geometry of the space where a small-scale patterned wallpaper creeps all the way up to the top floor, while a runner woven in a playful herringbone pattern climbs the stairs. It is unusual for the entrance hall of a London terraced house to feel surprising or delightful, but this one is both.
In fact, playful was one of the briefs the clients set Mary and Nicole. “The idea of how the children would live in the house and interact with it was a driving force,” explains Mary. “The clients wanted us to create a sense of magic and wonder.” Open any door off the patterned hallway and the staircase that creeps up the house and you discover more intriguing details. In the downstairs bathroom, a hand-painted floral motif climbs up the walls and onto the ceiling. It is indeed magical.
Back on the ground floor is the classic double reception room of London terraced houses. It was originally two rooms and is a notoriously awkward space to make work for modern living. Nicole and Mary treated it as a single, connected room, with one half acting as a grown-up drawing room while the other is a clever hybrid, serving as somewhere for the children to play at the table, a library or an intimate dining area. The owners are enthusiastic and very knowledgeable art collectors, so here, as in virtually every area of the house, an interesting mixture of good contemporary and 20th-century artworks hangs alongside more decorative pieces “It helped that we knew these rooms would have brilliant art to help finish them off so in a way we were creating a backdrop for it,” says Nicole.
The house feels remarkably established for somewhere created in such a short period of time. Much of that is achieved through the decorative details: the layering of fabrics, patterns, textures and artwork, and in some rooms the grosgrain trim that edges its way around the space. That said, some of the design decisions were based on the reality that this might not be the family’s forever home. “The truth is, the house was actually in good condition and didn’t need a lot of restructuring or restoring,” explains Mary. “That was another reason this was primarily a decorative project.”
It also explains why the house isn’t filled with unavoidably expensive new fitted joinery. “The idea of decorating a room that might only last a couple of years doesn’t sit well with us or the client,” she says. As such there is plenty of free-standing storage that can come with them when they do decide to leave, including modern, bespoke dressers in the drawing room and a smart library shelf in the adjoining room.
A sort of “masculine femininity” could be considered a Salvesen Graham signature, where floral fabrics are offset by sludgy or muted colorways, skirted furniture is counterbalanced by more tailored pieces and pretty details are used alongside more structured, tailored lines. The drawing room gathered fabrics sit against a tobacco backdrop, in the hallway geometrics meet florals, and even in the kitchen, chintz sits alongside joinery. In the main bedroom, a fully dressed four-poster bed and pleated lampshades are “oomphed up with rich inky colors like aubergine and dark blue,” as Mary puts it. The contrast really is the distinctive element that Mary and Nicole bring to a project.
