Tucked Inside a Walled Garden, This Cotswolds Home Still Has Its 17th-Century Charm

When interior designer Nicola Harding decided to sell her Victorian-era London home in 2018, her reasons were pretty standard, you might say: She craved more space, greenery, and calm for her family of five. But the countryside house they ended up moving into wasn’t at all predictable. “Right from the moment I walked through the door, it just captured my heart,” says Harding of the 17th-century property that’s tucked inside an idyllic walled garden in the Cotswolds. Despite its location next to the village churchyard, the house isn’t a vicarage or a priory, and was rumored to have once been used as a school and courthouse. 

Harding only heard about the place, dubbed Ivy House, coming up for sale through the parents of an old friend, who knew the owner, who had lived there for 40 years. “She really wanted it to go to a young family, and so we were very lucky to have the chance to see it before anyone else did,” she remembers.

The property had good bones, but the flow was “a very odd, rabbit warren of dark rooms not optimized for family life,” says Harding. The easy option would have been to add a large extension to the back, “but I find when that happens with these big old houses, people end up living in the modern bit, and the original part becomes rather sad and dusty.” So she called on the wisdom of architect friend Christian Fleming and deployed her 15-plus years of experience in interior design. Below, she explains how she gently tweaked this magical property so it became the ultimate family home.