This Georgian townhouse is more than just a new home for the owner and her family. It also represents a new start in a new city, and a new career in interior design
When the designer of this Georgian townhouse, Alex Strachan, was a little girl, she launched a campaign to have her bedroom decorated in Laura Ashley’s Oriental Garden Eau de Nil wallpaper. It took five years of pestering her parents, but her efforts paid off when they finally succumbed and let her give the room a makeover.
“I was forever rearranging the furniture in my bedroom, and I definitely had an appreciation for beautiful rooms,” remarks the interior designer with a laugh. “I think I got my love of antiques from my great-aunt Elizabeth. She still works at Christie’s; we’re very close.” Fast forward to 2022 and there were more negotiations on the table for Alex. She and her husband Mungo and their young family were quickly outgrowing their Victorian house in Clapham and knew they had to make a decision about their next steps. “Mungo is Scottish and I think we always knew we’d leave London and move to Scotland. As I began to plot a path north for us, I decided to sign up to the Inchbald School of Design in Chelsea first, and train to become an interior designer.” Alex immersed herself in the interiors world and quickly found her style.
“I worked with Sophie Peckett Design in London for a spell, which was so informative and gave me a broad understanding of how it all works,” she recalls. With experience and training under her belt, Alex was ready to set up on her own, and Scotland was the place to do it. “I spent a lot of time searching for the right Georgian townhouse for our family,” she says. “It was a process of discovery for me. Mungo knows Edinburgh, but it was all pretty new to me. In the end, it was the Georgian architecture that really won me over.”
The properties she considered had “to tick a lot of boxes”, but stepping inside this Georgian townhouse on a picturesque cobbled street in the New Town was enough to convince her. “I could see us living here. I saw a home that could give us the longevity we needed.”
It wasn’t in need of a full-blown overhaul; Alex could see that the previous owners had cherished the place. But she was eager to inject it with the kind of design personality she’d been dreaming of since her childhood. “It was so exciting. This was my first full project as an interior designer. After a spell staying with our in-laws in the Borders while painters and decorators got busy, I moved in and spent the first few weeks figuring out how this home would work for us.”
One question Alex found she kept repeating to herself was: “Can it be preserved?” She is always looking for ways to repair, refurbish and reuse; it stems, perhaps, from her early days learning about antiques, and certainly comes from her training at Inchbald which ignited her passion for dressing period architecture respectfully but with contemporary flair. In a vast Georgian townhouse like this one, over four storeys, it was crucial to think first about the spaces that were required for easy, functional family living, concentrating her attention on the dining kitchen, children’s rooms and living room initially.
On a sunny spring day the kitchen, at the rear of the property and open to the dining area, is washed with sunlight streaming in through the sash windows. The connecting archway is a clever, preexisting feature that chimes with the many period details, and gives the family a relatively open layout for modern living.
“The kitchen in this Georgian townhouse was installed by the previous owners. It was in good condition so I updated it by painting the cabinets in Mouse’s Back, offset by walls in Slipper Satin, both Farrow & Ball colours. There was an Aga here, which we removed because it made the room simply too hot, and it was expensive to run. In its place now is a Lacanche oven.”
Alex has made subtle alterations to the Georgian ownhouse that reference the property’s roots – note the panelling and the tonal changes that lead the eye to the cornicing and window shutters – but she has not been afraid to mix in contemporary highlights, such as bow brass handles by Beata Heuman and bespoke window seats in Schumacher’s Citrus Garden fabric.
