The house that came in from the cold

When Judi Lines first saw Ashcliff, she was house hunting on “a beautiful dead-end road,” on the Isle of Wight in England. At first sight of the property, Judi said to herself: “That's the ugliest house I've ever seen,” turned her car right around and drove away. But as fate would have it, the other listings she saw were even worse, so, with a resigned frame of mind, back to Ashcliff she went for a second look.

“I actually got out of the car that time,” says Judi, a Canadian ex-pat who moved to London, England, to marry her husband, Sid, 36 years ago. “In the 1950s and '60s, the owners built seven rooms on the house. It looked like a prison camp! It wasn't until I walked around the place to all different angles that I realized it just needed a lot of care, time and thought-and huge, huge sums of money thrown at it,” she laughs.

“The possibilities for reclaiming it in­­trigued me,” Lines adds, “and I fell under its spell. I finally thought, ‘It's perfect.'”

Judi, an interior designer, soon spearheaded a massive renovation that restored the sizable circa-1830 stone house, which had been chopped into five flats, back into one home. The nitty-gritty projects were numerous, and included demolishing the nasty additions (except one, which was transformed into a sun-filled study), re-plastering walls, and handmaking each window to match the remaining originals. “We wanted to be true to the house,” Judi states. Which was, as predicted, time consuming and expensive. Four years later, the old house has its soul back, along with all of today's creature comforts.

Appropriately, nothing looks jarringly new-it's as if the place has evolved, and that's due to Judi's style, which she describes as “old fashioned but not frumpy-timeless.” So timeless, she only needed to buy one new piece of furniture for this house (a Georgian linen press). She even remade her old curtains. Judi's secret? A neutral colour scheme, loads of texture, a confidence that comes from years of decorating for clients, and, most importantly, knowing yourself.

“I spent most of my career dealing with colour, so I didn't want any in this house,” she explains. “I've always thought that a room's ceiling, walls and floors are like a picture frame for everything in it, and that my furniture and pictures are good enough to stand on their own. I didn't want anything distracting from them.” She tested paint colours obsessively, she says, until she found a creamy gardenia colour that's now on every wall. “It makes it so very easy to retouch,” she says. “I never use white anywhere. It ages so badly to grey.”