Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all,’ wrote the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Well yes, Tennyson, but then you never knew the pain of losing out on a house you longed to buy. The interior designer Vanessa Macdonald and her husband James tried to move on, to be rational and accepting when this happened to them, yet the image of the house continued to haunt them. Occasionally, while viewing other houses in the area, they found themselves ‘just driving by’, noticing once more its lovely Georgian proportions and how elegantly it sat in the gentle green folds of this unspoilt part of Oxfordshire.
One day, three years after the house was sold, they wrote to the lucky owners, suggesting that if they ever tired of its perfection, they would be only too keen to buy the house. And, miraculously, the owners did want to sell, and in the month Vanessa and James’s first son Henry, now 11, had his first birthday, they had moved in. But there is always a fly in the ointment. The house was not the unimproved shell it had been when they first viewed it; ancient stone floors had been lifted, rooms switched about and new fireplaces installed. But none of this daunted Vanessa. For 13 years, she was the right hand of the late, great designer Melissa Wyndham. When Melissa died in September 2015, ‘it was quite an overwhelming time’, says Vanessa, but she rallied, took over the firm with Honor Hebblethwaite, and has upheld its name for excellent interior design.
There are stately homes, a cool interior for a young Hollywood actor and some super-modern London houses currently on the books and, for all of these, comfort and elegance are Vanessa’s priorities – as they are in her own home. By comfort she does not mean down-filled cushions or deep armchairs, though there is no shortage of those here, but rather that ease of living when there is always a table where it is needed to put down your drink, where your chair is perfectly lit to read the paper, and the furniture arranged so it is easy to have a chat with friends.
‘There is an almost inevitable way to arrange furniture in a drawing room of this size,’ she says, before going on to explain the complexities of decorating really large rooms and creating different conversation areas, without making the whole space cluttered. ‘It takes a bit more work, but it’s doable,’ she adds. It is refreshing to hear that rather than designing this room in one burst, as she would for a client, Vanessa slowly added curtains or a sofa cover as budget, or time, allowed.
