Look Inside This Eclectic English Countryside Escape
When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life.” So says Luke Edward Hall, the British artist, interior decorator, newspaper columnist, and designer of unisex jerkins, echoing another creative multihyphenate, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Georgian man of letters. Still, Hall’s partner, creative consultant and designer Duncan Campbell, chimes in, “There comes a point where you want a different pace, to be closer to nature, to have a different kind of socializing.” The bright young things toured the countryside in search of an impractical folly where they could spend weekends and even briefly considered shuttling idiosyncratically between two gatehouses before reason led them to something more usual. “It’s a kid’s drawing of a house,” Hall explains of the three-bedroom old farmer’s cottage that they found on a Gloucestershire estate. “A gable, four windows, and a door.” In addition to a small barn with a resident owl and enough garden space to let loose their inner Capability Browns, the house had been perfectly renovated by the couple’s landlord, who gave them permission to paint and wallpaper—which they did, with the same chromatic abandon that has made their mignon London apartment a widely published style icon.
The Cotswolds living room is olive, the dining room is a mustard-yellow, the main bath is lilac, one bath is arsenic-green, and the guest rooms are painted sky-blue and a blushing shade that Hall describes as “a gentle pink.” That last space was going to be high-gloss chocolate-brown, but, Campbell says, “London friends should feel like they’re in the country.” As for the contents of the house, they make up a glorious gallimaufry, much of it gathered from area dealers, flea markets, county auctions, even eBay. “I screamed when I saw those,” Hall says of the oversize lyre-shape fairground props that stand in the pink bedroom.
Elsewhere, a chrome-and-cane Breuer chair is pulled up to a 19th-century burl-wood desk, a ceramic table in the form of a recumbent camel stands beside a sinuous planter’s chair, and graphic museum posters speckle the walls. Hall and Campbell designed the pediment-shape headboards and dressed them in colorful velvets, and, the former reports, “We went mad with old Sanderson and Colefax chintzes and made them into curtains,” among them frilly Austrian blinds for the bathrooms. “Not the sort of thing we’d have in London,” Campbell points out.
More of This Eclectic English Countryside Escape
The main bedroom is the only pattern-wrapped space, the Svenskt Tenn wallpaper of green foliage—it’s a 1940s Josef Frank design—channeling the wind-ruffled meadow seen from the windows. Dreams of doing anything more intensive, decoratively speaking, such as painting a mantel to resemble lapis lazuli, were toyed with but summarily rejected. “You can do faux boiserie if you’re going to be someplace forever,” Hall observes with a shrug. “But when you’re just renting, you have to keep on your sanity cap.” lukeedwardhall.com campbell-rey.com —Mitchell Owens
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
