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A decorator's enchanting Regency cottage in the pretty Shropshire town of Ludlow
Libby Lord hasn’t always been a decorator, but all the signs were there. One of three children brought up in a Staffordshire mining cottage, she chose to paint the bedroom she shared with her sister in sunshine yellow, including the wardrobe and chest of drawers. Her grandpa owned an ironmonger’s shop that sold paint. ‘He put up a new Sanderson wallpaper in his 1970s bungalow every two years,’ she says, ‘and I loved that.’ Most telling of all, she wasn’t satisfied with her Barbie house. ‘I extended it with cardboard boxes and decorated the rooms with scraps from my mum’s sewing box. It was the envy of my friends'.
Libby wanted to be an actress, studied art and drama and then trained as a teacher, but she always painted and made things, and managed to spend her twenties earning a living as an artist, selling prints and greetings cards and designing packaging. In 1999 she moved to Ludlow and had a studio above the renowned Ludlow Period House Shop. This turned into a job running their Shrewsbury shop, from where she was headhunted by an interior decorator who taught her that ‘curtains were not boring’, among other things. In 2018 she set up on her own. ‘It was a bit of a long road,’ Libby says, ‘but I am now doing what I most love.’
Her terraced Regency cottage is a glorious testament to that love. ‘It’s not a lot of space to play with,’ she admits, ‘but I have decorated the hell out of what there is.’ She and her partner Ed Sinclair, who runs the Harp Lane Deli in the centre of the town, bought the house in 2017. ‘It was very 1970s, and very damp, but the previous owner had knocked the two downstairs rooms into one, which we liked'.
We had to strip off the gypsum plaster and replace it with lime, put in a new kitchen and bathroom and excavate to find the original living-room fireplace. When we first lit the new wood burner, there was a strong smell of bread from the warmed-up old bricks – a memory of the people who once lived and cooked here before the kitchen extension was built.’
The house is built over three floors, each one with two rooms, plus a tiny bathroom on the first floor and an even tinier shower room hidden in a cupboard on the top floor. ‘A lot of people choose to make a first-floor room into a sitting room,’ says Libby, ‘but we wanted space for Ed’s three children to stay, so have kept the upstairs as bedrooms. The ground-floor room has to function as living room, dining room and study'.
'I have decorated several of the many large, grand townhouses in Ludlow, but there is something wonderful about being let loose on a small one. You can make mistakes and it’s not too expensive to put them right – and you can have a lot of what you fancy, just in small helpings.’
It’s a formula that has resulted in a decorative tasting menu of delights. Behind the bright green front door and pots of red geraniums and velvety black petunias on the narrow front steps, a staircase of stripes rises up between walls garlanded with flowers, leaves and coiling tendrils, in a facsimile of a design taken from an 18th-century screen. The front door has an inner curtain of striped floral brocade, and the door on the left opens into the living room, which Libby describes as ‘a cottage pattern cacophony’. Certainly nothing matches and it is true that there are more different designs than you can shake a stick at: curtains splashed with multicoloured foxgloves, cushions sprinkled with violas, fat stripes, thin stripes, chairs in a geometric print, a zigzag of tiling in the hearth, marbled lampshades and a cupboard curtain dense with dahlias. Put together with an eye for colour and balance, the result is informal and charming.
A sofa stretches the whole length of the seating area, and a long narrow table does the same at the dining end of the room. A wall pierced by an unglazed window and door-shaped aperture separates the kitchen and is papered in a grassy green squiggle wallpaper that Libby chose in order to ‘bring the garden indoors. I love gardening, so there are flowers everywhere and on everything.’
Libby says the biggest influence on her decorating style has been Ludlow itself. ‘A typical townhouse here screams quality, but often has an antiquated kitchen and wonky floorboards. When I am asked to decorate one, the most important thing is not to undo its atmosphere. I prefer cobwebs and scratches to gleaming surfaces, so I am cultivating candle smut and letting the floorboards develop a patina. I like to throw in a curve ball of surprise among the dust, a shocking colour or a dash of the unexpected. But that’s very Ludlow too.’
Antony Crolla1/9The dresser/hutch came from Libby’s friends at Tinsmiths and is loaded with eBay and flea-market finds. Libby says they tried no less than five different dining tables before they found this one, which is unusually narrow but can seat eight when pulled out. It is a collapsible Welsh village hall table from Baileys Home in Ross-on-Wye. A 19th century French textile design is pinned up next to the pheasant chargers on the dresser/hutch, while the lichen-like Squiggle wallpaper from Colefax and Fowler on the end wall helps to bring the garden indoors.
Antony Crolla2/9Libby installed the wood burner and when it was first lit there was a distinct smell of baking bread, an olfactory memory from when this fireplace was used for cooking. On either side, the twin chairs are upholstered in Meander by Josef and Anni Albers from Christopher Farr, now discontinued. The television is in the niche on the left of the fireplace on a lever bracket, hidden behind a panel of Jemma Lewis’s marbled paper when not in use.
Antony Crolla3/9The first two flights of stairs in the house are papered in what Libby says is ‘the most wonderful wallpaper I have ever seen’, Le Paravent Chinois by John Derian for Pierre Frey. She is saving up to take it all the way to the top floor. The lamp on the antique stool is an original 1970s Tizio by Richard Sapper for Artemide.
Antony Crolla4/9There are two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor. This smaller bedroom at the back is used as a dressing room and has a Regency sofa upholstered in Jean Monro’s hand-block Rose & Fern facing a 1930s painted wardrobe that Libby bought from an antique dealer in Puglia.
Antony Crolla5/9The paintings in this bedroom are by Libby, the blue one ‘entirely in outrageously expensive lapis lazuli pigment’. Textiles pinned up behind the bed are an 18th-century crewel work fragment, a 19th-century French Indienne border and a 19th-century Italian mezzaro border from antique textiles dealer Katharine Pole.
Antony Crolla6/9Another wallpaper in an 18th-century design envelopes the front bedroom, this one Swakeley’s Chinoiserie from Hamilton Weston, while the festoon blind is in an antique Colefax glazed chintz, as is the frilled bolster. The tallboy holds bed linen and towels and was found on eBay. The painting above the bed is Libby’s portrait of their whippet Lady as a puppy.
Antony Crolla7/9Libby and Ed’s bedroom is on the top floor at the back of the house, overlooking their garden and the gardens of houses in neighbouring streets. Lancaster wallpaper from Jean Monro wraps walls and ceiling, and the striped bedcover was a present to Libby from Ed. Curtains are ‘Ebury’ from Colefax as are the cushions on the bed in Leaf Damask, chosen to echo the view of next door’s fig tree. Behind the wall of matchboarding facing the bed and painted in Coming Up Roses from Atelier Ellis is a tiny bathroom.
Antony Crolla8/9The house is one of a terrace built by a Whig politician at the beginning of the 19th century as a bribe to potential supporters who had to be property owners in order to vote. Libby has crammed the small garden with all her favourite flowering plants.
Antony Crolla9/9Perfect English Small and Beautiful by Ros Byam Shaw, published by Ryland Peters & Small (£40)
