Colour consultant Fiona de Lys' magical north London cottage
Colour consultant Fiona de Lys’s home is something of a balancing act. Built around 1750, this weatherboard cottage, perched on the outer fringes of High Barnet, sits at a tipping point between town and country. It also balances her English and Italian heritage, the rugged and the refined, drama and simplicity. Having missed out when it was previously for sale, she pounced when it came back on the market in 2016. Last renovated in the 1970s, it had lain empty for years before she bought it. ‘I could hardly get through the front door because of the brambles,’ she recalls. ‘Everything needed doing, but the bare bones were there.’
Fiona grew up in an Arts and Crafts house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a model community created in north London at the turn of the 20th century by social reformer Henrietta Barnett. ‘I was surrounded by the influence of William Morris, Gertrude Jekyll and Liberty,’ she explains. ‘We also had a huge kitchen garden, which started a love of all things botanical.’
The various strands of her career – which include styling and working as a freelance interiors colour specialist, as well as collaborating with Edward Bulmer as a consultant and content creator – can be pulled together under a term that she describes as ‘aesthetic narratives’. ‘If someone has a story at play and it involves colour, I can guide them,’ she says.
Just as when she works with clients, Fiona’s starting point here was the feeling she wanted to experience in each room, often evoking childhood memories: ‘Once I have that, I observe the light and identify the colour that is the link between the intended emotion and the function of the space. Art plays a big part, too, because it’s the second layer of colour.’
Each space has its own narrative. In the sitting room, for instance, Fiona sought to reflect her love of English woodlands, with vivid green walls capturing the distinctive tones of sunlight filtered through leaves. ‘It had to be a very rich, solid green,’ she says. In the dining room, she tapped into memories of childhood summers with her mother’s Italian family in Sardinia and Liguria: ‘I wanted to embrace the heat of the landscape – those beautiful villa façades, all terracotta and pinky orange.’
In her bedroom, the walls are the colour of a Ligurian sky. ‘The starting point was a specific lilac you find above the sea, but because this is a south-facing room, it can take quite a strong colour. So I pushed it a bit more into this shade of deep amethyst,’ she says, explaining her choice of Edward Bulmer’s ‘Tyrian’. She chose bathroom tiles for their particular shade of aquatic green. ‘There’s a beach in Sardinia where you can swim out to a shipwreck through beautiful vibrant seaweed. When I’m in the bathroom, I’m submerged in that experience.’
An Italian influence is also at play in the kitchen, which evokes the ‘unfitted, simple and rustic’ feel of her grandmother’s home. A richly veined marble countertop in rust and russet, with a linen curtain below, runs along one wall; almost the entirety of the opposite wall is taken up by a vast wooden credenza, once her grandfather’s. ‘It’s just natural wood, stone and cloth in this room, with no strong colour,’ she says. ‘I wanted the impact to come from the flavour and aroma of food.’
Big-bellied Mediterranean vessels feature in every room. ‘I go for those that have the most imperfections – the ones with a story,’ says Fiona. ‘For me it’s about balancing patina, function and the experience we can have by engaging with a piece in a reimagined way. When I’m in my kitchen, with my old credenza, I’m not in Barnet: I’m transported to another place’
Fiona de Lys: fionadelys.co.uk
