Fashion stylist Louise Roe's Georgian farmhouse

I hadn’t even got out of the car and I knew the house was the one,’ says Louise Roe of the Georgian farmhouse that she relocated to from Los Angeles earlier this year, with her husband and young daughter. ‘I was crying as we drove up to it as I actually felt that it was our house. My husband was laughing and telling me to stop because tears would probably make it quite hard to negotiate.’ The house was just the second that the couple saw in the flesh on a six week trip back to the UK last summer and after a few months of gentle renovation and redecoration, is now home and has been since the start of the lockdown.

Both Louise and her husband Mackenzie grew up in the English countryside, but have spent the last few years living in the sprawling city of Los Angeles. ‘I think in LA you get used to having a lot of space around you, so we didn’t want to move to London and a smaller house, much as we both love it. We missed walks, wellies, country pubs and wanted that lifestyle here, plus we’re not too far from the city so we get the best of both worlds.’ But there is another element that caused Louise to crave the life she now has – the decoration. Having grown up in English country houses, it’s a look that doesn’t work in LA; ‘it’s cosy, comfortable and lends itself well to real living, whereas LA is predominantly so modern it doesn't lend itself to messy, real life with kids.’

As for the house itself, the Georgian property – Louise’s favourite type of architecture – is ‘very symmetrical and pleasing to the eye from the outside.’ It has a farmhouse feel to it and importantly for the stage that the couple are at with a two-year-old daughter, it’s child-friendly. One of Louise’s favourite things about the house and the architectural style is that it isn’t open plan and there are ‘different rooms for different things’. When they took on the house, Louise and her husband did very little structural work to it, other than raising an archway in the kitchen to prevent Mackenzie from constantly hitting his head. It was more a question of updating the electricity and the pipes and restoring some of the original features that had been lost over the years.

MAY WE SUGGEST: Fashion stylist Louise Roe's farmhouse kitchen

For Louise, it was important to have a heritage builder work on the house, ‘as they know what tiny bits to save during the process, rather than chucking it all out.’ In a stroke of luck, she one day saw a builder entering a beautiful, massive Georgian house nearby, ran after him and booked him in for their own house. Questionable method, perhaps, but with a winning result. The building work and decoration took around five months to complete, with all the carpets removed, floorboards polished and reclaimed boards put in where original ones no longer existed. A wall in the snug that had an indent in it was moved to become a straight wall. During the whole process, Louise and her husband rented nearby and were able to pop in most days to have a set of eyes on what was going on. ‘If you’re there,’ Louise explains, ‘you have a voice and you don’t have to undo any work later on.’

The decoration was the part that excited Louise the most. An avid reader of interiors magazines, she had amassed varied references for styles that she wanted to emulate and had an idea of what she wanted to do as soon as they bought the house – ‘I love decorating and was so excited for the move that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.’ Louise did the decoration herself, though she did seek some advice from Jane Churchill - ‘I love her, she’s a legend’ – and was lucky to have Edward Bulmer himself come to the house and give her guidance on the historical colours that may have been present in the property during its heyday. ‘His knowledge is unbelievable and he even helped us source a ceiling rose which an elderly neighbour who used to live here told us had once existed in the house. It came from Thomas & Wilson, and they told us they hadn’t had a request for that pattern for a very long time as it’s an original Georgian feature.’

The ceiling rose is in the drawing room, the most formal room in the house and Louise’s favourite to spend time in. She put her bureau desk in there – sourced from an antiques shop in Petworth and ‘probably my favourite thing in the house’ – as ‘often rooms without a television in them don’t get used, so I wanted to have a reason to spend my time in here’. The walls are painted in ‘Brick’ by Edward Bulmer, a colour choice that she had decided on when living in LA. She was so sure of it that she reupholstered two cane chairs that she bought at a flea market for $250 in a Lisa Fine textile to complement the walls and planned a blue velvet sofa from the Sofa Workshop opposite that ties it all together.

MAY WE SUGGEST: A Georgian cottage with expertly layered interiors by Ben Pentreath

Colour was a starting point in the kitchen too and Little Greene’s ‘Sage’ was the choice. ‘I felt I had seen too much blue in kitchens and I wouldn’t love it forever, but this green is timeless. I had to remember that it’s not sunny here like it is in LA so I chose a warm green.' The colour heightens the farmhouse feel of the space, which Louise was keen to emphasise. She worked with British Standard to create a homely, functional and utterly lovely space. She was 'really keen to have all the appliances hidden so it could feel traditional and old-fashioned’ so the team at British Standard created integrated storage behind cupboard doors. The kitchen opens onto a playroom for their daughter, half painted in a sunny yellow colour called ‘Trumpington’ by Edward Bulmer and half white panelling. Across the hallway is the formal dining room in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Oval Blue’, another key colour consideration for Louise: ‘I love red dining rooms but I’ve seen a lot of them and wanted something different’.