From the outside, Henry Halley's London home looks like an ordinary period house, but inside it is a different story – with spacious, welcoming interiors and an inspiring mix of old and new

The houses in southwest London where Henry Halley lives have a deceptive quality. For Victorian terraced homes, they are surprisingly light and well proportioned. They offer another surprise in that you enter at ground level and walk down to the basement, which leads into the back garden. It turns out that the streets themselves are raised – a common trick in the 1840s; it was a way of allowing coal holes and services to be hidden away beneath the new roads.

Henry Halley's home is particularly well served with sunlight and natural warmth due to its recent treatment by architects Groves Natcheva and interior designer Antonia Lazenby. The entire house has been radically re-invented since Henry, a City banker, bought it three years ago and began to mastermind a delicate balancing act between old and new.

“I spent a year living in the house and thinking about what to do with it,” explains Henry. “Then for a year and a half there was building work in which everything from rewiring and plumbing to a lot of structural work was done. The lower ground floor used to consist of four small rooms, which we opened up completely with new supports.”

Henry has lived in the area ever since he graduated from Cambridge, first buying a flat with one of his two sisters, and then a small house. But he underestimated the amount of time and level of commitment that re-modelling his new four-storey home would demand. He set about turning the lower ground floor into a modern, open-plan kitchen and dining area, with additional space gained by claiming some of the garden. Structural changes were also made on the floors above, including heightening and extending doorways. For the decoration upstairs, Henry was quite clear that he wanted a more traditional feel but he didn't have the time to achieve it on his own.

“I was getting to the point where the main building work was finishing, but I had no idea about how to pull the interiors together,” he admits. “At the same time, I was also immersed in a very intensive project at work and there was no way I could go over to the house every morning and then turn up to meetings covered in builders' dust.”

On the advice of a friend, he turned to Antonia Lazenby, who had worked with James and Philippa Thorp of Thorp Design before setting up on her own a year ago. She took on Henry's existing ideas and furniture and shaped them into a cohesive scheme. “The architectural look downstairs is obviously very modern,” she says, “and the worry was that it might become too clinical, so our challenge was to make it visually friendly. Overall, a key way of getting the whole scheme started was to make sure each room had a definite purpose; this encouraged Henry to be a bit more adventurous than he might otherwise have been.”

He had already decided that the formal living room would be on the first floor and that the ground floor should be reconfigured as a more relaxed study-cum-television and dining room. There were also a number of family pieces to be woven into the scheme, including the dining table, and a mirror in the sitting room. Henry is a descendant of the novelist John Buchan, who wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps; he owns a bureau that once belonged to the author, books and various other pieces, including an imposing bust that now presides over a bookcase in the study.

“The living room became a more formal space, but the study in particular needed rescuing from being filled with technology,” says Antonia. “I wanted to make it into a room where you would want to get the fire going – to be a place where you could sit on a lazy Sunday afternoon and feel content and cosy. Henry's taste isn't overly masculine but there were a few details, such as the Ralph Lauren floral curtains, where he needed some persuasion and I had to ask him to trust me.”

Texture and splashes of colour were used throughout to add character – the hessian wallcovering in the study being a prime example. In the living room, there is a Bruno Triplet grasscloth on the walls, while a new fireplace from Chesney's creates a focal point, topped with a reconditioned mirror inherited from Henry's parents. The delicate glass oil lamps on the mantelpiece were found by Antonia in a shop on Madison Avenue in New York.

“As the process went on, I gave Antonia much more latitude, since I felt I could not only trust her, but that she could come up with much better ideas than I could,” says Henry. “As a layman, you think you have ideas but, once your great idea has been used up, there is still the rest of the house to be done. Apart from the basement, where there was no point in pretending it could be anything but modern, I wanted interiors that would be in keeping with the house. Antonia is instinctively more modern in her ideas than I am, but I think she's got the balance right. The house is now a great combination of the old and the new.”

WORDS DOMINIC BRADBURY
PHOTOGRAPHS MARK LUSCOME-WHYTE
JUNE 2006