We wanted to give the old girl a good tart up,” laughs New Zealander Neil McLachlan of his six-bedroom home, a Georgian pile on the leafy fringes of the Forest of Dean.
An eye-catching coral pink exterior with matching entrance columns sets the stage for his 1695 house, which he shares with his partner, Raymond Roche, and their rescue border terrier, Minnelli.
Neil has been an interior designer for more than 30 years, entering the creative world at 18 when he relocated from Auckland to Paris to study in an haute couture fashion house, honing his love of exuberance and colour, while mastering the art of millinery. His father, a modernist architect, influenced his design and architectural fidelity and, despite spending a large chunk of the 1990s on TV screens as the go-to designer in the Kiwi version of Changing Rooms, today Neil works with clients all over the world transforming houses and hotels.
For 50 years, the building was a home for men with learning difficulties before Raymond and Neil bought it. The rooms had been chopped up into dormitories, bedrooms and bathrooms, the kitchen a commercial behemoth, fire doors and alarms cluttered the woodchip and carpet-tile décor. The institutionalised edifice would have caused sleepless nights for the average house buyer but, for Neil, it was an exhilarating project. “We had such immense fun putting this house together,” he says.
It took them three years to transform the building, with a painter employed every day for 18 months. The entrance gives way to a wide hallway with black-painted floorboards layered with colourful Persian rugs – a feature used throughout the house – directly into a glamorous dining room where a grand piano awaits. The pair are ardent entertainers who regularly throw dinner parties into the small hours. Neil, an accomplished pianist, has a second grand piano in the sitting room upstairs, ensuring access to the ivories in all social situations.As the only willing and able volunteer for miles around, he is also deployed as the village organist.
Neil’s design calling card might be wallpaper. Almost every room boasts a different style, including Parrots of Brazil, a jungle print by Mind the Gap, which flourishes in the dining room. The starting point for Neil and Raymond was the grand tour, a historical rite of passage taken by Georgian aristocrats touring Europe and beyond, sending home purchases of exotic art, textiles and furniture to lavish their homes, with a particular penchant for chinoiserie. “Pineapples and palms were very popular,” explains Neil. “They were considered extremely grand, a decorative status symbol, nobody ate them.”
These motifs are reflected all over the house: a palm wallpaper decorates the master bedroom, while pineapples are papered in the dressing room, chinoiserie print cushions decorate armchairs and a Ming fabric from Pierre Frey is used for the kitchen blinds.
“The references of palm trees and pineapples tie it back to the grand tour. Wallpaper is such a marvellous tool as a backdrop,” says Neil. “It doesn’t have to take centre stage, but it can highlight architectural detailing and provide a visual rigour that can be toyed with.”
This visual rigour is key to Neil’s interior toying, despite a cacophony of textiles, papers, furniture and art, the house does not feel cluttered. Instead, it feels layered, as if Raymond and Neil have lived there for decades.The key to creating this is balance, says Neil.
“The house is busy, yet you feel calm walking through it. We have so much stuff, making it all hang together is a skill. You must curate, curate, curate,” he says.
Few structural changes were made, but the kitchen was a boot room and they had to fight with the planning authority to move a wall. Neil’s choice of a restrained sunshine-yellow paint articulates the 19th-century architectural arches in the renovated kitchen, while a light fixture for the ceiling was built with traditional plaster moulding to display a series of glass decanters repurposed as pendants over the island. Behind, a pair of giant reclaimed corbels invite you through the new opening into the snug.
Upstairs, the sitting room reveals wallpaper, a faux-panelling design on the ceiling rather than the walls, which are painted in Dilkusha blue, notes of russet dance in the textiles and a Hollywood, regency chandelier glitters atop. Gilded antique lamps, once owned by the Austrian royal family, guard a contemporary painting by Ross Lewis on the mantel. “We wanted a calm palette for this room, which feels suspended in the trees,” says Neil. “The blue paint offsets the landscape and the orange adds zing and warmth. It’s in the rug, the blinds and the Japanese imari plates on the wall. Even for pattern lovers there needs to be careful punctuation of calmer and often transitional areas. Wallpaper can be joyous and sophisticated, but like many things it is often best in moderation.”
Mahogany furniture and the family silver soup tureens have been on their own grand tour, having been shipped to New Zealand in 1879 by Neil’s great-grandparents and almost 150 years later they have returned to the UK after Neil shipped them back. “It’s so important to have fun in life and houses must have fun, too,” says Neil. “Every new owner must go forwards, not backwards, we don’t want to live in a museum. We wanted to take the old girl on a different trip.”
