In Colour: An Interview with Nicola Harding

“So often people imagine that more is more, and that to get the most out of both spaces you need to see and access all of it at all times. But actually, I think that’s one of the big mistakes of our time,” says Nicola Harding, as we sit at a long European oak dining table in the converted mews house in Queen’s Park that serves as her headquarters. Her chocolate Labrador, Raye, happily prances around us, managing to sneak into the portrait shots our photographer is trying to take.

The scene has a quintessential charm that captures much of what has made Nicola Harding one of the UK’s most in-demand interior designers. Known for what she modestly describes as ‘lipstick’ changes, she excels at reconfiguring rooms, carving out inviting seating nooks, and recontextualising historic homes as light-filled, colourful spaces suited to contemporary life.

Seated in the pastel-toned, open-plan room, which combines kitchen, dining, and living areas, the space exemplifies her approach. From the generous seating area filled with plump sofas and an assortment of lamps from her Nix range to the rose-hued double doors, flung open in summer to welcome the passersby of Lonsdale Road, it feels relaxed and homely while keeping the eye darting from one elegant vignette to the next.

We sat down with Nicola to explore her philosophy on colour, how her landscaping background has influenced her approach, and why she believes a view of the garden from the front door is often overrated.

I’d moved around a lot as a child, so I was desperate to create my own home. When I went to Edinburgh University, I moved heaven and earth to get hold of a flat to make my own. Those were the days when you could get over a 100% mortgage from the bank. So I managed to buy a two-bedroom flat that didn’t have any central heating and hadn’t had anything done to it for years. I turned a cupboard into a kitchen so I could create an extra bedroom and fill it with friends to help pay the mortgage.

I came down here and bought a place near Old Street roundabout. That house was exactly what nobody was looking for. It wasn’t old, it wasn’t new; it had been built in the ‘80s or ‘90s. There was a woman living there with five dogs. It stank, and it had been on the market for ages. I bought it for a song and converted what had been a garage into an extra bedroom, so I could do the same thing again. Friends of friends, and my now husband’s boss, had seen what I’d done. So people started asking me to do things for them and it just grew from there.

I didn’t have any formal training. I wanted  to learn as much as I could but studying is so expensive. So I decided a better way, since projects were coming in, was to learn on the job  — to work with the best people I could find, whether that was making curtains, upholstery, or buying antiques and just asking as many questions as possible.

So I started working with people like Christopher Howe and Christine Vanderhurd and all sorts of antiques dealers. I had my eldest son around then and I’d be going to shops with him in my arms, breastfeeding in the corner while asking questions.

One of the people I identified early on was Joa Studholme, the colour curator for Farrow & Ball. Colour felt completely alien to me, I knew I loved it, but I didn’t understand its language. So I brought her in on my first couple of projects as a colour consultant. She was incredibly generous with her knowledge and we became great friends.

Through that, I started to understand the different worlds of colour; the historic use of it, the science behind it, even simple things like how painting a window frame darker draws your eye through it, while it stops at the palest thing it sees. And then there’s the art of colour, which is less about rules and more about feeling.

It amuses me now that colour is something people associate strongly with my work, because it once felt completely outside my skillset. But I think sometimes, like when someone learns a language as a second language, they end up speaking it more precisely, you approach it more analytically. That’s probably the only explanation: I’ve just really interrogated it.

I do have a slightly “Rain Man” ability to remember paint colours and visualise them clearly. And in a way, it’s such a cheap trick – if you’re doing a project, you’re almost certainly painting anyway, so the choice of colour adds no extra cost, yet makes an enormous difference.

We work on projects of all scales, and when you need to stretch a budget but still create a radical change, colour is incredibly effective. That doesn’t mean bright colours, there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’ve walked into a nursery with primary colours everywhere, but a subtle, thoughtful palette can completely transform how a space feels.

I think people have already spent a lot of money on the bricks and mortar, and everyone’s terrified of getting stuck in a rabbit hole of unknown building costs, timeline and planning, especially with listed buildings. If you can bring some imagination and flair to what you’ve already got and transform it…

The traditional mindset has been, well, if something doesn’t quite work as it is, then we must talk to an architect. And of course, an architect’s going to come up with an architectural solution, but actually some paint colours make the most enormous difference.

When I think about a property, I’m really thinking about it holistically. So often people imagine that more is more, and that to get the most out of both spaces you need to see and access all of it at all times, but actually I think it’s one of the big mistakes of our time; the idea that you open the front door and can see the back of the garden. 

Architects are often thinking big, they want those vistas and that great photography shot where you can see everything. Whereas us, mere mortals, want tucked-away corners where we feel protected and safe. That isn’t a grand reveal and it doesn’t necessarily look like much in a photograph or on a floor plan, because it’s about shoehorning a small moment into an underwhelming corner to make it special.

The ceiling is a massive surface area in a room that isn’t interrupted by furniture. To not think about what colour to paint it feels like a missed opportunity. That said, what the space is like really dictates what colour makes sense. If you want it to feel light and airy, you probably wouldn’t paint it a different colour from the walls, especially if there aren’t many corners and the walls aren’t very high. You’d likely just wrap the same colour all the way over.

But if it’s a bigger space, painting the ceiling differently can help bring it down to feel more intimate and cosy, or to really highlight an incredible light fixture. Or playing with the ceiling. Or if it’s a tiny room at the back of a house overlooking a car park, and you need to make it exciting, why not have fun with the ceiling?

It really depends on the client; what moves them, what kind of language they speak. Are they a feeling person or a practical person? I try to figure that out and then work with them in whatever way is most comfortable. I’m a feeling person myself, so I start by thinking about how the room should feel? How does the client want to feel when they’re in it? Interior design, for me, is a byproduct of creating a mood, rather than the other way around.

People hiring an interior designer often don’t know how to describe the style they want. But talking about what they want to do, at what times of day, and how they want to feel is much easier to articulate. I work through that with them, using interior design as a kind of magic toolbox to facilitate those experiences — helping the house manifest the life they want to lead.

It’s all about unpacking with clients what brings them joy and making those joyful moments easy to experience in their home. I think maybe everyone does that to some degree, imagines what life at home could feel like. How do you picture Christmas? Is it just a tiny handful of people who are precious to you, or do you want to throw the doors open and have everyone you’ve ever met? After a hard week, do you want to come home feeling very closeted, or would you rather host a big dinner party?

There are, I think, deeply rooted fantasies in there. Pulling them out and looking at them helps us ask: how can we create a home that really brings all of that to life? So often people approach it like symptom versus cause; they think, “Okay, what does this house need?” But it’s better to start with: what do you really need and want? And then, how do you make the house fit that, rather than make your life fit the house?

Exactly, everyone comes in for breakfast and coffee and we sit together in a bit of a group session. People talk about where they’re at, why they’ve come, and what they want to get out of the day.

Then we go upstairs and I walk through my process. I explain how I approach a new project: how people spend their time, what time of day they do certain activities, how the light moves through their house and so on.  We talk about the client brief and each step of the process: working out the floor plan, lighting, finishes, paint colours, and all the decisions we made, right through to the finished result. People are also doing more “snack-size” projects rather than tackling the whole thing at once. The consultancy is a great way to do that: bite off a bit at a time.

We moved from the Cotswolds to Bristol about 18 months ago. We’re in the process of doing a house there and currently living in rented accommodation. I felt a real sense of responsibility as a mum to create a nurturing home. 

But I was absolutely gobsmacked by how quickly our rental felt like home. The two key things were lamps and art. We’re at a time when people move around or rent more and lamps work wherever you go. You might have one in a bedroom in one place, then in a drawing room in the next. In our tiny kitchen, we’ve got something ridiculous, like eight different lamps dotted around.

Art was the other thing. We’ve got a wonderful picture hanger I’ve worked with for 20 years. He came down and hung 80 pictures in a day! Some are just little silly bits, but when they’re all splashed on the walls, it feels really homey. Remember, things don’t need to be perfect, they just need to feel right for you.

Thank you to Nicola for her time and insights.

Consultations with Nicola can be booked here.