A Berkshire country house packed with unexpected colour by Nicola Harding

When the new owners of this Georgian-style house embarked on a major revamp of its interior, they decided to ‘call in the big guns’. Enter the interior designer Nicola Harding, whose sense of style and eye for colour put a new spin on the idea of escaping to the country.

‘I have sleepless nights about how it’s going to turn out,’ Nicola says with a laugh. We are discussing some of the colours and paint combinations she plays with in her projects. ‘And it can look awful before the furniture goes in,’ she adds. It is not that her choices are particularly avant garde, but they are certainly unexpected. Apart from anything, this can be a powerful tool for knocking any sense of stuffiness out of a space.

That is one of Nicola’s greatest achievements at this large house in Berkshire. Despite additions over the years, it has retained its pleasing neoclassical symmetry. There is certainly a sense of grandeur as you approach the house via its long, narrow drive through the grounds, crossing a little bridge along the way. It was the inside of the house that sold it to Clare Woolfenden and her husband, however. ‘We had seen so many big, old country houses,’ she explains. ‘But their layouts never really seemed conducive to modern family life. You could be in one part of the ground floor and have no idea what was going on in the other.’ This one, however, had an appealing flow of spaces. ‘You never feel far from the action,’ she continues. Which sounds handy with two young sons.

What about that stuffiness? I have seen photographs of the interior taken before the couple bought the house and, while it was perfectly smart, it is fair to say it did not exactly hum with energy. ‘The house needed something to make it feel a bit younger – and to show it belonged to them,’ Nicola explains. It does not take long to work out that this is not the home of someone for whom a move to the country meant abandoning any sense of metropolitan edge. It did not involve buying a job lot of half testers and acres of chintz, or a deep scrutiny of historic paint charts. It is, without being self-conscious, far cooler than that.

Clare (a lifelong Londoner) and her family had moved from west London, where Nicola had helped out with one of their rooms. ‘Buying such a big house, I knew I would need some advice,’ Clare recalls. ‘The sheer amount of furniture required – where do you start? Nicola was an obvious choice – she has an incredible gut instinct and an amazing way of visualising things quickly.’

The entrance hall is painted a zingy green with wood-work picked out in aqua blue. It is quite a statement. ‘The best designers push you a little bit out of your comfort zone,’ Clare says. ‘When Nicola suggested that green, I thought it was far too bright. I was afraid that I would hate it, but it has become the colour I like the most.’ Beyond this is the dining room – its low ceiling painted the same blue as the bookcases that now line three of its walls. With its brass table by Matthew Cox, low-hanging brass pendants and red velvet-covered chairs, it conjures the intimacy and glamour of a private dining room in the type of members’ club that I would rather like to join.