English Country Style Meets Victorian Charm in This London Home

Interior designer Elizabeth Macfarlane had her heart set on a Victorian villa in London, but when the house went to another buyer, she took a chance on another property in the neighborhood: a neglected late Victorian, early Edwardian home that had been stripped of nearly all its original features.

Working from archival research and a clear sense of what the house could have been, Elizabeth and her husband brought it back to life, recreating period cornices and fireplaces, laying oak parquet floors, and introducing marble mosaic and furnishings that nod to the Victorian era.

A former lawyer, Elizabeth approaches her own home as an exercise in English country house style, the aesthetic at the heart of the work of her design firm, Macfarlane Van der Heul. She balances traditional architectural details with collected art, antique furniture, and richly patterned textiles.

A painting, an antique lamp inherited from her grandmother, and a piece of 1930s floral fabric found at a Paris flea market each helped shape the home's considered palette of soft greens, yellows, pinks, and browns. In the kitchen, a Victorian-inspired dairy table and a pantry lined with brown-and-white china lend the space a country-house sensibility, while a sunroom filled with plants connects the interiors to the garden beyond.

The result is a house that feels as though it has been assembled over generations, despite having been almost entirely rebuilt. From the marbled-paper ceiling in her husband's study to the cheerful butter-yellow utility room and a tucked-away reading nook painted warm pink, Elizabeth's London home is a thoughtful study in historical detail, considered restoration, and the art of making old and new feel entirely at home together.