Interior designers Nicole Salvesen and Mary Graham talk to Rosalind Sack about their modern perspective on a quintessentially English style and creating homes that withstand the test of time
INTERIOR DESIGNERS NICOLE SALVESEN (RIGHT) AND MARY GRAHAM (LEFT) OF SALVESEN GRAGHAM. IMAGE: SOPHIA SPRING
Since launching their eponymous interior design practice in 2013, Nicole Salvesen and Mary Graham have designed everything from London pied-à-terre apartments to grand country estates, all with their modern expression of a more traditional English look. Their debut book, A New English Style, is a celebration of their most inspiring projects and signature design principles. It showcases their exceptional skill for tailoring their timeless style to the personalities and lifestyles of their clients, in a way that can evolve with them.
Here, they discuss future-proofing their design schemes, how they approach trends, spatial planning and visual balance and why you should always make room for the unexpected.
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF BEING SURROUNDED BY OBJECTS THAT MEAN SOMETHING TO YOU, SAYS MARY. IMAGE: SIMON BROWN
How do you weave a timeless thread through your work and how do you approach fleeting trends?
Nicole: We always like to look to historic references. Because if a part of a scheme – whether that is a fabric, a colour, or a piece of furniture – is historic in its nature, it has already stood the test of time. It could be a new design that has been based on historic references or an antique; by including those in the rooms that we’re designing, we are always going to have that timeless element running through a project. We definitely try to ensure that something doesn’t feel too much ‘of a moment’ and too bold a decision that’s going to be regretful.
Mary: There are ways of incorporating trends that are more transient and don’t dominate a scheme; it might be in accessories or artwork that’s not too much of a costly and permanent decision. It is okay to give yourself license to do something that you might want to change in five or 10 years, especially if it’s a family home. Because by the nature of things getting used and worn out and damaged, you’re probably going to be updating it anyway. The English style, which we love, is built on people bringing in new trends. The very nature of it is layer upon layer of different generations adding the latest craze; from the Georgian times to the Victorian to now. So it’s okay to add your 21st century layer onto a home.
You talk about visual balance. Can you explain more about what it is and why it is important in a timeless design?
Nicole: It means that nothing in a room shouts too loudly. By having that balance you always feel comfortable and the rooms feel comfortable to the eye. That’s also why they don’t tend to date, because they’re quite gentle.
Mary: The other thing that is key is getting the bones right, because then whatever you layer on top of that can change, it can come and go. It’s so important to get the architectural details and the layout right; all the sorts of things that maybe people don’t realise that we do. That lays the groundwork for a really great home that will stand the test of time.
MARY AND NICOLE RETAINED A MORE FORMAL STRUCTURE TO THE LAYOUT IN THE LIVING ROOM OF THIS HOME IN COLORADO (LEFT); WHILE THE CENTRAL SPACE IN THE HOUSE SERVES AS A HALLWAY AND LIBRARY. IMAGES: SIMON BROWN
Your positioning of furniture is so clever and often there’s an element of surprise. How do you first approach the spatial planning in a home?
Mary: First and foremost, it’s about practicality and what works in a space. So if you’re sitting on a sofa and stretch your legs out, can your feet reach the ottoman? Then you layer on what looks good, so we might add an occasional chair purely because it’s a really interesting piece and it’s upholstered in a great fabric. Its job isn’t to be the practical, useful piece of furniture, it has another job which is to look really nice.
Nicole: A classic layout can be quite formulaic, so we will always consider the nuances of that; so the shapes and sizes and heights, and what’s going to work in the space. Often when you walk into a space and it feels awkward, it is about the furniture. Perhaps everything’s too far away from each other, or there isn’t anywhere to put your glass down. We’re always thinking about how someone’s really going to live in the space all the time; where they will open their stockings on Christmas morning, where they will play a board game on a rainy day, where the elderly relative will sit. It’s not a show home, it needs to be really practical and that starts with the furniture layout and where everything goes.
What are some of the more practical ways that you can design a home for now, but also allow for it to evolve?
Mary: A classic example we always use is if you’re designing a child’s bedroom for a ten-year-old, give it a few years and they may want a double bed rather than that nice little bunk bed or single bed. So you need to future-proof it so the bedsides still work, so we’ll place the wiring and power points for the plugs or wall lights further apart. And where kids might have a doll’s house now, they may have a desk and a computer in five years’ time. So we may add joinery that houses toys to start with, but can become a workstation later. Our job is to have that long-term approach, so we’re designing in a way that allows people to grow and evolve without the room requiring significant further work.
Nicole: It comes back to sustainability as well, we don’t want to be putting things in that we know will be ripped out and obsolete in five years. So with things like bathrooms, you may need a bath to bathe a baby, but when you’ve got a teenager, it’s more practical and quicker to have a shower – so that needs to be considered. We use both our personal and professional experience to identify those areas where change is likely to happen and the best way to circumnavigate that.
GLAZED NIB WALLS IN THE COLOURFUL AND LIVELY FAMILY ROOM OF THIS GEORGIAN HOUSE, WHICH FEELS A FAR CRY FROM A STUFFY ENGLISH PERIOD HOME. IMAGE: SIMON BROWN
Tell us about nib walls, because you use them quite a lot and they are a brilliant way of making a space more adaptable…
Mary: We’re generally not huge fans of large, open plan spaces, partly because it just doesn’t give you the usability of lots of different rooms. People think it gives them flexibility, but actually it’s the opposite.
Nicole: Certainly, in a London house you end up with almost just one room, and that can be problematic because there’s nowhere for anyone to retreat to. We use nib walls to accentuate the divides of the rooms and allow for different uses and areas, and we often add glazing in order to make them feel more substantial. They can also enable a wall finish to end; whether that’s panelling, or wallpaper, or a paint colour. Because with open plan spaces you tend to end up with a vast expanse of one thing and there’s nowhere to stop or start it – then you don’t have that feeling of layering and interest.
Mary: They’re also brilliant, from a practical sense, at creating a corner that you can tuck a chair into it or place a standing lamp, without it feeling like it’s floating in the middle of a massive space. Also, if you’re not doing the glazed screen at the top, they give you places to hang art. There’s so much you can do with those little spaces.
You talk in the book about always trying to make room for the unexpected, such as the yellow flower room at Trewithen Country Estate (pictured below). How can you ensure that something like this sits comfortably with the adjoining space and doesn’t date?
Nicole: You don’t just paint the room yellow, you also ensure that the detailing of the joinery within it or the fabrics, for example, feel very traditional and historic, so you have something grounding it. And that particular shade is quite a timeless yellow, it’s not highlighter yellow.
Mary: And the colours that the room is coming off are neutral, so it really works. If we’d also done one trendy room after another, after another, it would feel too gimmicky, an assault on the senses. We quite often choose a calming, earthy, natural colour for entrance halls or the vein that runs through the house. We find it works really well if you then open the door into something more exciting. So we tend not to have the excitement in the heart of the house and the rooms that you’re moving through, but it’s revealed to you in the room beyond. The yellow flower room at Trewithen makes such a lovely viewpoint. When you’re standing in the kitchen, you look through a sort of enfilade of spaces, and then right at the end you have this pop of yellow. We often want to make utility rooms cheerful, because you’re in there scrubbing muddy rugby boots or whatever, which is never a particularly fun task!
Nicole: We’ll often pull a room together and be feeling really, really happy with it. Then we’ll look at the whole house at this point, and then sort of mess it up a bit. It needs to have something to dislodge it a little bit so it doesn’t feel too perfect. It always needs to feel liveable and comfortable.
Mary: We will always look at the whole house in its entirety together and often discover themes that were actually subconscious. So that bright yellow in that house also appears in a little cabin bedroom and in the drawing room there are little splashes of bold yellow. And I think when you’ve got those threads running through, it helps the rooms flow and feel well considered, but not too obvious.
THE JOYFUL BRIGHT YELLOW FLOWER ROOM IS A FOIL TO THE MORE NEUTRAL ‘BACK OF HOUSE’ AREAS WITHIN TREWITHEN HOUSE, A COUNTRY ESTATE IN CORNWALL. IMAGES: SIMON UPTON
How do you strike that balance between a homely and comfortable English style, and one that feels overly cluttered and therefore uneasy?
Mary: We want to design in a way that can accommodate all those things that one picks up during life, so a room’s not full to bursting before our clients have even had a chance to add their own layer to it. And then we try to tailor certain elements. So where, in the ‘80s, curtains were really gathered and ruched and all sorts of things could be lost within the folds of voluminous curtains. We might use the same kind of blousy chintz, but in a slightly more tailored style. We laugh and say it’s ‘masculine femininity’ – we use quite classic floral fabrics, but in a slightly more masculine way, to give it a bit more space to breathe.
Nicole: The reality is that we’re designing lots of pied-à-terre apartments or second homes or multiple homes for clients, because that is the nature of the industry that we’re in. Therefore, they’re not necessarily going to gather possessions in the same way that they would in a primary home, yet they still want that English style, which is historically a more cluttered idea of a home. So we bring that in with other things, such as the layering of fabrics, so that it still feels full.
How can you try to ensure that a home continues to look and feel as good as it does when you have just finished it?
Nicole: It’s really important for us to understand right at the beginning of a project what sort of person our client is and what they are going to want to have in their home. Because the way that we design the interior needs to balance that. If they like everything to be really clean and tidied away behind closed doors all the time, then we need to make sure that we create that feeling of generosity and interest in a different way.
Nicole: Clients often show us imagery at the beginning of a project and say, this is what I want my house to look like. But it’s really important that we talk them through what that actually involves. So they may show us endless photos of all these amazing bookcases full of books, but we have to say, do you actually own any books? And often they say no, or yes in our main house, but not in this one.
Mary: And it sounds silly, but even down to things like flowers. If you’re not going to have lovely cut flowers in your house regularly, then a big centre table with a massive vase on it is not for you, because it’s going to look sad and empty 90% of the year. And that’s fine, because then we’ll find an obelisk or a piece of sculpture instead. That honesty right from the start is so important. Because if you’re naturally messy then we need to design a house that’s going to look nice for you with minimum upkeep. If you’re really particular and precise, we need to design something that’s still going to look characterful by the time you’ve lined everything up to within an inch of its life. It works both ways!
CAREFUL PLACEMENT OF FURNITURE AND LAYERS OF FABRIC IN THIS LONDON PIED-À-TERRE CREATES BALANCE AND WARMTH. IMAGE: CHRIS HORWOOD
What is the essence of ‘home’ for you, because you’re not just designing beautiful schemes or projects, you’re designing homes for living?
Nicole: The way that we would define a home is somewhere that’s incredibly welcoming and comfortable and that you can really live in. Ultimately, we never want someone to walk into any room that they don’t feel that they could sit down on a chair, or that they can exist in.
Mary: Home obviously means different things to different people and, again, establishing that at the beginning of a project is really important. To us, home means comfort, but maybe to someone else who has a hectic job, they want to come home to a level of order. So it’s really important to understand what your home needs to give you on a more emotional level.
Nicole: The kitchen is such a good example of how a room can be approached so differently. Right now, we’re working on anything from a home with a kitchen that needs to cater for 50 people coming to stay for the weekend, to a home for someone whose kitchen is their job, to a kitchen for someone that has no interest in food and doesn’t want to spend any time cooking at all. So that’s one of the key places where we start to understand what a client really wants, and what home means to them.
Mary: And whatever it means to you, and it is different for everybody, your home has got to be a reflection of you and your personality. There’s nothing more depressing than seeing a house with no indication of the type of person or the interests of the people that live there. The difference, when you allow yourself to actually show your personality in your home, is immense.
A New English Style: Timeless Interiors by Salvesen Graham, written by David Nicholls, published by Quadrille, is out now here.
THERE’S NO POINT HAVING A PIED-À-TERRE IF IT ENDS UP LOOKING LIKE A HOTEL, SAYS NICOLE. SO THEY CREATED WARMTH WITH TEXTURED WALLPAPER, ARTWORK AND FABRICS. IMAGES: CHRIS HORWOOD
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