A once-ruined neo-Jacobean house in Shropshire transformed by Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay

Next door, in the more formal drawing room, the tone is set by the warm ripe wheat colour of its hessian wallcovering. A collection of African masks blends with mid-century furniture and lamps. The carpet here, which came from Henri’s London house, was too small for the room, so she has laid it over a larger one of inexpensive seagrass squares – a trick that she recommends to clients who are waiting to purchase a larger rug.

‘The dining room was excruciatingly noisy,’ Henri continues. ‘At our first dinner party, you couldn’t hear your neighbour.’ So she tented the ceiling with Ralph Lauren fabric, filling the gap with chicken wire and insulation, covered the walls with the same striped fabric and hung huge brass lights just above the table. A fabric-covered jib door opens onto the dark and glamorous bar with a marble and brass cabinet, which is everyone’s favourite room when she and Hugh entertain. But for sheer fun, even the bar cannot compete with her daughters’ bedrooms: eight-year-old Edith has red-and-white-striped wallpaper, while Josephine, 16, enjoys a Fifties Riviera vibe, with tropical wallpaper, wasp-waisted straw lampshades and curvy, leopard-print headboards.

All is serene though in the main bedroom, which overlooks a ravishing landscape of unspoilt valleys and distant hills. Walls in a subtle grey green and curtains of the palest blue silk – the colour of a spring sky – make a backdrop for some beautiful things, including a gilded Chinese screen and sprays of brass leaves by Curtis Jeré. ‘There’s also a bit of a Thirties Japanese thing going on in here,’ says Henri, opening the door to the glamorous main bathroom next door, its curvy cupboards covered in an oriental-style gold and white wallpaper.

When she and Hugh first met in New York, Henri was an art director in charge of fashion shoots. She had to be constantly aware of deadlines and of the need to plan but remain flexible – and to always have a plan B up her sleeve. She organised the decoration of the house with the same efficiency and acute eye for detail in design. This was a great help when, as the family moved into the unfinished house in October 2010, Hugh told her he had invited his entire family, all 27 of them, for Christmas. ‘It was the nearest we got to the end of our marriage,’ she says, laughing. But she got it done. ‘And we had a great time’.

henrifitzwilliamlay.com