A fresh take on country in the city in a designer’s Thameside flat
Should you find yourself teleported to the capacious chintzy sofa in this sitting room, you might assume that you were in the countryside. The generous scattering of cushions, the rugs, the fabric lampshades, antiques and flowers (both fresh and in painted form) all speak of a rural idyll. It is only when you glance out of the window and tune your ear to the sporadic calls of the rowers below that you realise you’re somewhere more urban, looking out onto the River Thames, next to Hammersmith Bridge in west London. This is no country cottage, but a two-bedroom flat, three floors up in a red-brick Edwardian mansion block.
‘I wanted it to feel like a country house where we had lived forever,’ explains its owner, interior designer Louisa Greville Williams, who bought the flat in 2024 after almost 30 years in the country. A combination of an empty nest – her two sons had ended up in London – and the fact that she had recently launched LGW Designs after years of working with Sarah Vanrenen, made a move back to the city entirely logical.
‘Living in Wiltshire was lovely, but it was also ridiculous to have six bedrooms and four-and-a-half acres to manage when it was just me living there,’ reflects Louisa. Contradicting the old adage that the countryside is where you go to escape, she admits she has found huge contentment living in the city. ‘This flat has given me incredible freedom,’ she says.
But she had her share of challenges. For starters, finding the flat took the best part of two years, which happily became a joint endeavour when Louisa met her now husband Dominic. She realised she wanted a flat in this block after borrowing one in the next-door building from friends for a few months. ‘Living out of suitcases gave me a chance to work out exactly what we wanted,’ recalls the designer, explaining that she set her sights on a third-floor flat with a riverside sitting room. Eventually, this one came up, its amazing river views and well-positioned kitchen and bathrooms countered by the fact that it was tired and hadn’t been renovated in years.
‘It needed gutting, but was structurally sound,’ explains Louisa, who reconfigured the two bathrooms, gaining space by losing a small lobby and putting in a jib door to the second bathroom. Permissions took months and scaffolding (from external building-wide works) resulted in the builders – Laybel Interiors, with whom she has worked before – having to take each rubble bag down three flights of stairs.
But, like all good designers, she had a clear sense of what she wanted: ‘All the decorative schemes and joinery were designed months before the builders even started and two things were really important to me. I wanted it to be relaxed and countrified, and also somewhere that would feel like home to our combined family of six children.’ With this in mind, she was able to carve out sufficient space to seat up to 14 for dinner – quite the feat considering the flat is essentially four rooms – with two tables in the open-plan sitting room and kitchen, plus a niftily positioned bespoke banquette that makes the most of the bay window overlooking the river. The tables were sourced afresh, owing to the specific dimensions required, but almost everything else has been in every house Louisa has owned. This ranges from the chintzy sofa covered in Colefax and Fowler’s ‘Roses & Pansies’ to the artworks clustered on the walls – ‘a hotchpotch’ that Louisa has collected over the years. ‘I can’t bear waste,’ admits the designer, who takes the same approach in her projects, which range from a farmhouse near Cambridge to a flat in Chelsea and a French chalet. ‘It is much easier to work from scratch, but it’s a worthwhile challenge to repurpose.’
Existing pieces often informed the palette for an entire room, as was the case in the snug, street-facing sitting room, where a painting owned by Dominic, now hanging above one of the sofas, inspired Louisa to paint the walls in Edward Bulmer’s terracotta-toned ‘Malahide’. This room also serves as an occasional extra bedroom, with a bespoke, extra-deep sofa (one of the few new pieces in the flat) doubling as a single bed. But the open-plan sitting room and kitchen has to be the pièce de résistance, a charming confection of colour and pattern, with the blue kitchen joinery, skirting and window frames taking their lead from the colours of a rug that Louisa has had for years. ‘It really helps on a dreary day,’ she says.
So too does the glossy green hallway, built up layer upon layer by paint specialist Laura Ann Morris of Art Tropezien, which has an almost clubby feel. ‘It’s a windowless space and so it needed to sing for its supper,’ explains Louisa. So impactful is it that it has proved a conversation starter for almost anyone who steps over the threshold.
The two bedrooms and main bathroom are peak country house, with wallpaper providing a charming backdrop to a mishmash of antiques, skirted lampshades, suzanis and floral prints. The main bedroom took its palette from the colours of a beloved jumper, the browns of the Veere Grenney wallpaper and furniture offset by a turquoise lamp. In the spare room, she was able to use a Jean Monro fabric for the headboard that she’d been ‘drooling over for years’, which clashes deliberately with Hamilton Weston’s ‘Kennington Stripe’ wallpaper.
The main bathroom is another properly decorated affair, hung with yet more wallpaper and furnished with a vanity converted from an antique chest of drawers and a chintz slipper chair. Even the bath has become a thing of beauty, with Louisa indulging her long-held desire for a shaped marble splashback: ‘I wanted this room to be pretty rather than utilitarian.’ The whole flat is an exercise in achieving this: a place where life can be lived well. ‘It feels like arms around you when you walk in,’ Louisa concludes.
Louisa Greville Williams: lgwdesigns.co.uk
Christopher Horwood1/6High-gloss emerald walls painted by Laura Ann Morris offer a dramatic backdrop to framed pictures, a doll’s house made for Louisa’s mother by the architect Norman Evill and an antique mahogany console. The striped runner from LGW Designs adds contrasting colour under a Hector Finch ‘Temple’ light.
Christopher Horwood2/6
Christopher Horwood3/6‘Berrydown’ wallpaper in berber brown, by Veere Grenney from Schumacher, tones with the headboard in ‘Amiera’ gold linen by Namay Samay and valance in ‘Maury’ peat cotton by Fleurons d’Hélène from Tissus d’Hélène.
Christopher Horwood4/6Walls in Tutti ‘Little F Paper’ from Howe at 36 Bourne Street, a marble splashback by stonemasons PM Bines and a slipper chair in ‘Georgina’ cotton chintz from Nicholas Herbert contribute to the comfortable country feel.
Christopher Horwood5/6The zellige floor tiles are from Mosaic Factory.
Christopher Horwood6/6Hamilton Weston’s ‘Kennington Stripe’ wallpaper showcases the cupboards in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Arsenic’ painted with floral details by Eliza Downes.
