words Malcolm Jack photography Tom Mannion

A house crying out for personality, a client unafraid to take a risk and a designer with bags of ideas and a point to prove: the fates were clearly aligned as work began on this listed country pile, designed by Studio Hollond

Classic kids’ fantasy tales. Astrology. Alice in Wonderland. Not, perhaps, the usual influences namechecked by interior designers when describing the inspiration behind their work. But Phoebe Hollond, founder and creative director of Studio Hollond, is more than happy to claim them as her own. “I love playing with scale and mixing things that you just wouldn’t expect to see together,” says the designer, who trained under the celebrated Beata Heuman in London before setting up her own studio in 2020.

This property, a listed country house in Sussex, parts of which date from the 15th century, was one of her first major independent projects, so she really gave it her all. There’s a feeling of peering through the looking-glass as you admire its exuberantly coloured and patterned rooms; the designer’s rich imagination has added depth and surprise and even a twist of the surreal to the reinvention of what is otherwise a fundamentally comfortable and practical period family home full of history and heritage.

“Those ceilings are not tall – you’re pretty much bumping your head in some places,” notes the Studio Hollond founder, referring to the mighty 500-year-old oak beams in some of the oldest parts of the house (a legacy of a time when ceilings were kept deliberately low to trap heat).

Instead of downscaling her design choices to fit, she took the opposite approach. Note, for example, the swirly shell lights that Studio Hollond installed, handmade by the sculptor Ian Bishop and dotted around the walls of the ‘Dutch dining room’, as Phoebe calls it (its colourful floor tiles inspired by similar rooms she had seen in Amsterdam). “Those lights are deliberately over-scaled,” she explains. “So too are the big hurricane lanterns on the sideboard. Introducing elements like that create a surrealism which I think is really unusual and interesting.”

The living room has a delicately imperfect symmetry – almost identical on each side, but not quite. A pair of antique table lamps are similar, yet different. Left of the fireplace there’s a window; to the right there’s a picture that looks like a view from a window. “I always feel that having symmetry is great, but having something that’s a bit unexpected is even better – that’s something that we carry through every Studio Hollond project,” says the designer.

Some of the furniture and fittings in this room too are purposefully outsized. “Those pink armchairs in front of the fireplace: I designed them as part of my product collection that I’ve just launched. They were inspired by Alice in Wonderland. I really wanted something super-tall and curvaceous and quite crazy on either side of fireplace. They are almost Dali-esque, in a way. Almost slightly trippy.”

The homeowners are a couple in their late thirties with two young children who wanted to create a home that was full of life and energy. “A big part of this project was balancing their tastes,” says the creative director of Studio Hollond. “She is quite bohemian and used to be an art dealer, while he wanted everything to be clean and streamlined.”

That balance clearly leaned towards the boho side for the most part. But all of the themes and ideas in Phoebe’s work link back in some way to her clients, their interests, their personalities and the things they wanted from their new home. A calming environment to return to after a stressful day’s commute to London was one of their main requests of Studio Hollond.

“The master bedroom – that’s his blue sanctuary,” she says. “Yeah, okay, we sneaked a chintz chair in there. But on the whole, that’s a very serene space.”

The clients vetoed one specific colour at the outset of the project, but Phoebe pushed back against the restriction. “An English country house without any green would be a crime,” she smiles. “I think having even a tiny bit of green in every room brings the outside in.”

The founder of Studio Hollond managed to smuggle it in subtly through textiles, artworks and wall fixtures: a high-gloss green mirror above the fireplace in the living room, a thick stripe running through the tablecloth in the dining room, a lampshade or a scatter cushion here or there. “Green felt especially important in this house because from most of the rooms, you can see all the trees outside,” Phoebe notes. “It just creates a sense of peace and harmony.”

But the designer didn’t treat every original aspect of the property as sacred, and she wasn’t scared to make bold improvements to enhance its functionality and flow for a modern family. In the earliest phase of the project, she worked with a local structural engineer to take down internal walls to create two grand central rooms that anchor the house, as well as a long, open-plan sitting room and library, and a spacious kitchen and dining area that connects the older and newer wings.

This is an excerpt from Written in the Stars, a feature following Studio Hollond in issue 159 of Homes & Interiors Scotland magazine

Buy your copy here to read the full feature

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