I recently completed a exciting design project, and thought I'd share the process with you in a series of blogs. The project is situated within one of the villages at the very beautiful and multi-award winning Lower Mill Estate in Gloucestershire.

Lower Mill Estate. Photo credit: Lower Mill Estate

I've been working with Lower Mill for several years as interior stylist for their show homes, photo shoots and advertising campaigns, as well as interior design for individual owners. The estate properties are built to the bespoke requests of the owner, mainly for use as a second home, or holiday homes rented out via Lower Mill Luxury Holidays.

I was very excited when I received a call from brother & sister duo in charge, Red & Ruby Paxton, (coolest names ever right?), inviting me to get involved with their latest project. The concept - to design a collection of luxury apartments, with a view to creating a "holiday home meets hotel" feel. The apartments are self catered, but with clean sheets, fluffy towels and branded bathroom products as part of the service. The luxury stay experience continues with the aah-mazing, (also award winning) spa on site, with an outdoor heated pool, and the most stunning views of the surrounding nature reserve.

We decided to keep the basis of the design scheme to neutrals (the apartments will be for sale at some point) with individual and varying levels of colour and pattern. I feel I should say at this point - I know I bang on about pink quite often (OK very often) but I don't really inflict that pink-ness on all of my clients. Not unless they ask. However I do like to work with colour, and so it was a really interesting process for me to start with a completely neutral backdrop - and I liked it! Grey is my favourite "neutral" so I worked with this as my main colour library. Some fixed items were developer options only (i.e. carpet & tiles) so I had to work those in too. The result - can you believe it - My Interior Stylist goes "greige"! I actually really embraced the chance to work in this way, because it means texture and pattern become much more important. As we were on a tight schedule, I wanted to ensure that we could tie down as much of the scheme as possible in one meeting. With this in mind, I came up with my little interchangeable mood board idea.

The basic board looks like this.