Centuries of Austen, Milton, and Shakespeare have left us with myriad fantasies about life in the English countryside. The many styles of the houses that have littered the more remote parts of England often reflect the history and culture of the neighborhoods they are in, as well as the many stewards that shepherd and protect these houses.
British interior designer-cum-antiques dealer Max Rollitt follows this rationale, designing homes that reflect their owner’s personalities, lives, and the land that surrounds them. “What’s becoming increasingly obvious is that being human and bringing humanity to design is the critical bit,” says Rollitt. “Joy is what I would hope to bring into people’s homes.”
That same mentality was brought to a 7,300-square-foot home in the Southwest of England designed with architecture firm Simon Morray-Jones for a financier, who moved with his wife and two children from New York back to his native country in 2018, partially to be nearer to his extended family. “The house is one of these typical English farmhouses that has evolved and been tacked on with bad repairs to fix it in various stages of wealth,” says Rollitt. These adjustments might have at times been hokey, but the quirks ultimately contribute to what makes the house special. “There is a spiritual element there,” says Rollitt. What originally began in the 1500s as a humble farmhouse, developed into a charming, rambling floor plan over time, with different owners adding and adjusting the house to fit their needs (and their budgets). “The only thing I was very insistent on was that I didn’t want to have anything in the house that tried to make it different from what it is,” says the owner of why they hired Rollitt. “I wanted it to have an authenticity about it.”
Rollitt together with architecture firm Simon Morray-Jones led a full gut renovation and brought an order to the flow of the house. It was an organic, intuitive, but highly precise process. “I always think of designing a home as painting a picture,” Rollitt says, “and the picture evolves in my head.”
That picture was inspired by the vast landscape outside. Bordering the 92 rolling acres on which the house sits are ancient English Woodlands that were already considered old in the time of Henry VIII around when the oldest part of the house was built. It was actually this natural wealth that served as the current owner’s selling point. “It was the spirit of the place we bought rather than the house,” he says. It follows that his primary request of Rollitt was to design a home that could best take advantage of the surrounding views and the beauty of the changing seasons. As the family’s primary residence, the house needed to function, beautifully, year-round.
The views were a priority while reorienting the interiors. The kitchen moved from the east of the house to the west, and a 20th-century pig sty was knocked down to open the landscape. “The kitchen now has a beautiful view down the valley,” says the owner. The bath in a top floor bathroom is perfectly positioned to take in the ancient woods in the distance. The shower of the primary bathroom has windows positioned to the east and the west. “A lovely way to start the day,” says the owner. Deep set window seats, nooks and crannies make for private, quiet places for the owners daughter and son to read—one of their favorite activities. “There are lots of spots where you can look out the window and see birds, foxes, badgers, barn owls, and deers,” the owner says.
Rollitt approached the decoration holistically, designing rooms that served multiple purposes while doubling as throughways, linked visually by colors and textures that reoccur in several spaces. One hallway was outfitted like a theater, with red striped walls and a dramatic, wine-hued curtain at its end. In the library, where the owner’s son spends hours practicing his piano, the built-in bookshelves are washed in a grey green similar to the color of the wainscoting in the mudroom and the closets in the primary suite. The peach hue of the study walls reappears in the kitchen and a sitting room, while rush matting covers most of the floors, interspersed here and there by hard wearing antique rugs. Under the eaves Rollitt even added two French antique box beds, installed to look like built-ins with the surrounding new wood stained to match. “The kids absolutely love it,” the owner says.
The magic of old England is retained in the home’s original architecture, heightened by decorative flourishes by Rollitt. An antique wooden screen separating reading spaces at Oxford’s Bodleian Library inspired the addition of a similar screen in the drawing room—a space challenged by changing ceiling heights, odd volumes, and more external doors than a room of its purpose needs. Rollitt used curtains to de-emphasize other doors, which littered the walls in irregular places, following the home’s ad hoc floor plan.
The truth of the house is that it is not grand. It doesn’t need to be. Rollitt understood what to do with it and what the family needed it to be. “Max is a guy who understands family life and dogs and teenage dynamics, because he has a family of his own,” says the owner. “More importantly, he understood what the place was and what it wasn’t and that didn’t phase him.” Not only did Rollitt make the house more of what it was, but he injected new energy into it as well. “The house was very tired and feeling really quite infirm and now its got this new vitality to it,” says the designer. “It’s about setting its bones back in place and restoring its strength.”