When designer Louise Bradley needs to get away, she heads straight to her cottage in Hertfordshire, where exotic finds rub shoulders with oak beams and open fires

As soon as Lousie Bradley gets into her car on a Friday evening, her thoughts turn to her Hertfordshire cottage and the restful weekend ahead of her. Leaving her interior design and lifestyle HQ on London's Walton Street behind, she takes the A1 to her bolt hole. “It's perfect to be able to leave the city and be in the peace and quiet of the countryside in an hour. The idea was that I would work four days a week in London and one day at the cottage, but it's never really happened like that. That is still my goal but I find that when I'm at the cottage during the week, I keep thinking I'm better off at the showroom,” she confesses. “It's the same for so many people – I think you have to be a great delegator and very trusting. With the design side, just by being on site you can answer things within five minutes.”

So the cottage is where she goes to recharge her batteries. Set in a quaint little village, the small listed house has views over open fields and parkland where she and her dog, miniature wire-haired daschund Marni, like to walk. It is a blissful setting and over the past year, Louise has gradually turned the interior into a modern take on country living. “The cottage already had so much character it really dictated the end result. Apart from putting in a new kitchen and bathroom, which is still on the ground floor, I've not changed the layout at all,” she says.

Working as often as she does with clients' period properties, decorating a beamed cottage with just five rooms presented Louise with few fears. “It was more a case of going with what was there,” she says. To counteract the low-beamed ceilings, she painted the whole cottage in Stone I from the Paint & Paper Library and chose neutrally-toned flooring, including a beautiful limestone for the dining room, to create a sense of open space. “I like the Mediterranean look and I love olive trees,” she says pointing to a healthy specimen growing in a basket in the corner of the dining room. In contrast to this quite open, elegantly rustic room and the simple country-style joinery of the kitchen beyond, the adjoining living room is a smoother, more luxurious space dotted with idiosyncratic accessories – a look that many of Louise's clients will instantly recognise. Clean-lined sofas face each other symmetrically in front of the raised fireplace, which Louise designed herself. “I wanted it so that you can see the fire from the dining room and enjoy the warmth of the flames as you lie watching the flat-screen television suspended on the opposite wall,” she explains.

Louise has carefully chosen all the accessories in the cottage to give a relaxed but individual feel. “I could never be without my metal-ring bowls – they add texture and scale,” she says, “while treasures like these cowbells and the bracelets, which I bought in Africa and had mounted on perspex plinths, remind me of specific moments in my life.”

Lighting is another crucial ingredient in both Louise's home as well as in her design work. For the cottage, she wanted soft, low-level ambient washes of light, but to give the dining and living rooms a more dramatic mood she has included in each a single John Cullen ceiling spotlight. Carefully positioned, in the living room it casts an eight-degree beam down on the coffee table, and in the dining room illuminates the centre of the dining table. This is a modern way of imitating the candlelight that would have been the cottage's original lighting and a typical example of Louise's sympathetic approach when it comes to decorating a period home.

“I like to create something that is classical with a modern twist, a look for today that won't go out of date quickly,” she concludes. “You have to respect the fabric of a house, especially if it has been there for a long time. Features like high ceilings, huge windows, beams and old floors need more sympathy than features in a modern house.” It is a recipe she has put to good use at her Hertfordshire home, and she firmly intends to apply her ideas to the garden, too – as soon as she can find the time.

MARCH 2006
WORDS ARABELLA ST JOHN PARKER
PHOTOGRAPHS EDINA VAN DER WYCK