The eclectic, colourful London house of a novelist and lifelong collector
The gods were definitely smiling when the Glasgow-born author Andrew O’Hagan was commissioned by The New York Times to interview Jane Ormsby Gore, founder of JR Design, at her house in Wales. The two found that they had an immediate meeting of minds. ‘He is such an intriguing character and I instantly admired his eclectic view of life,’ says Jane. ‘He was about to buy the studio and he asked me to look at it, as he had fallen in love with the green walls of my sitting room on his visit.’ Andrew is equally enthusiastic: ‘I just had to have her come to see our place, and we started working together almost right away. I love her sense of how to make a space different from anything else. She’s a true bohemian – a one-off, and a distinctive genius about colour and atmosphere.’
His new London home, which he shares with his wife Lindsey Milligan, an actors’ agent, is in Primrose Hill and is one of 11 studio houses speculatively built in the 1870s around a rectangular courtyard. Previous residents have included Arthur Rackham, Sir Henry Wood and Patrick Caulfield, and today the houses are home to many artists and designers. The couple’s house has two storeys, with a tall, galleried studio room on the raised ground floor and two bedrooms in the basement below.
Jane’s – entirely correct – attitude to design is that she should create a shell within which her client can feel comfortable enough to add their own stamp, stating that Andrew is ‘mega’ at turning a house into his own. He is a great collector and there is evidence of this in every room. The first thing Jane did was to replace a wood-burning stove in the main studio sitting room with a chimneypiece of dark stone from Nicholas Gifford-Mead, appropriately made in Glasgow, while her daughter Ramona Rainey, working for her mother’s firm, found the Venetian mirror.
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Unsurprisingly, Andrew is an avid reader and has hundreds of books, so shelves were built wherever possible to accommodate them. This includes floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side of the chimneypiece, which magnificently emphasise the height of the room. The walls were painted in the same green Andrew had admired in Jane’s own house – ‘Invisible Green’ by Edward Bulmer Natural Paint – and, inspired by a recent visit to William Morris’s home in Walthamstow, Jane had the floor painted with wide blackand- white stripes, over which she has placed a herringbone wool rug. Completing the room are a burnt-orange velvet sofa from Sofa.com and some of Andrew’s huge and varied collection of paintings. This includes one of a glorious reddressed girl. After Sickert by Jeremy Duckham – a scenic artist whom Andrew got to know – is based on Sickert’s 1892 painting of Minnie Cunningham singing in the Old Bedford Music Hall in Camden Town. The finished effect is both airy and supremely comfortable.
In the small kitchen on the raised ground floor, a zingy red Smeg fridge stands on the red-painted boards and a mural painted by artist Tony Roche inspired, Andrew says, ‘by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to keep a bit of Glasgow on the go’, dominates one wall. In the adjacent eating area at one end of the sitting room, beside a huge dresser made by Luke Ellis of Kent & London, colourful dining chairs from Howe London are paired with an original Arts and Crafts table from Heal’s. Above this is more of Tony’s work – a hand-stencilled ‘sky’ of painted beams, inspired by the magical ceiling of St Francis of Assisi’s Basilica in Italy.
Downstairs in the basement, ‘Beech’ wallpaper by Lewis & Wood lines the walls of the main bedroom. Jane designed a stepped headboard covered in rich green velvet for the bed made by Seventh Heaven in Wales, which, topped by a large, star-shaped 19th-century Spanish sun mirror, leads the eye into the space. Andrew’s generous study next door is dominated by a mahogany desk from Ian Anderson – ‘a Welsh Christopher Gibbs’, according to Jane. It faces another Gifford-Mead chimneypiece in pale sandstone and a pair of vintage Forties two-seater sofas from Lorfords positioned on either side of the room. Walls in Robert Kime’s small-scale ‘Sunburst’ wallpaper in terracotta, and the eye-catching central light from Vaughan, combine with a fascinating and varied selection of paintings that complete the impression of a Victorian gentleman’s sanctum, rather than that of a successful 21st-century novelist.
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Throughout this house, there is a sense of order as well as pattern. Under the surface style, there is a well-thought out structure, very much like a good piece of writing. You have the feeling that a critical eye is travelling over the arrangement of each room and that adjustments are continually being made, so nothing stays exactly the same from month to month. It seems that Andrew, guided by Jane, is as good an editor of his surroundings as he is of his writing. And together, their combined sense of colour has produced a palette similar to that used by some of the lusher High Renaissance painters, with, of course – given Andrew’s love of Jane’s sitting-room walls – greens that could come from a Holbein or Bronzino painting. In short, it is a jewel of a house in the middle of London.
How does Andrew feel about the space that Jane and he have created together? ‘It has all the light you’d expect in a former painter’s studio and the place is full of stories. Several of the Glasgow Boys painted here and, sometimes, with the fire burning in the grate of a winter’s night, I stop to imagine all the work and all the lives gone by,’ he says. ‘It’s a very lived-in house, too. A good party space and a nice place to sleep, and it’s just the cosiest and most interesting house to me. We feel very lucky to be here.’
JR Design: jrdesign.org
Paul Massey1/7Chairs from Howe London surround an original Arts and Crafts table from Heal’s; the dresser is by Kent & London.
Paul Massey2/7The underside of the gallery was stencilled by Tony with designs drawn from the ceiling of the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Italy.
Paul Massey3/7Walls in ‘Invisible Green’ by Edward Bulmer Natural Paint provide a background for artworks including Jeremy Duckham’s painting of a girl in red, After Sickert.
Paul Massey4/7A Smeg fridge, floorboards painted in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Rectory Red’ and an Indian rug pick up on the colours of a mural by Tony Roche, inspired by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Paul Massey5/7
6/7A Vaughan light is positioned over Andrew’s antique desk from Ian Anderson.
Paul Massey7/7Above the chimneypiece by Nicholas Gifford- Mead, George Houston’s painting Ayrshire, 1914 echoes the earthy tones of Robert Kime’s ‘Sunburst’ wallpaper.
