Houses
When Heide and Nick swapped London life for village life, they asked our columnist Rebecca Wa kef ield to give their new home a modern edge
STYLING Kate French
FORMAL LIVING ROOM
The two chairs, two wall lights and the art hit a contemporary note in this otherwise classic country house scheme.
home profile
Heide and Nick Miller. Nick is a mortgage broker and Heide works in e-commerce. They live here with their one-year old daughter Phoebe and dog Pedro.
Rebecca Wakefield, founder and director of London-based Studio Fortnum. She is passionate about creating stylish, calm and unpretentious interiors with an emphasis on textures and materiality.
An 18th-century home with new extension. There are four bedrooms, three en-suite bathrooms and a family bathroom upstairs. Downstairs, there is a living room, two utility rooms, kitchen with a snug area/playroom, reception room, boot room and cloakroom. There is also a garage with a en-suite bedroom above it.
Cambridgeshire natives Nick and Heide Miller always knew they’d probably leave London and settle down nearer their parents on the outskirts of Peterborough. In what would end up being perfect timing, the couple began their move in 2019 just before Covid spread across the country and enticed city dwellers to move out in search of more space. ‘I’ll always remember the day we viewed this house,’ says Nick. ‘Heide and I had our hearts set on another house in a different village. We looked at this house online but we weren’t impressed with the pictures. We were even bickering about the other house, which we loved but we couldn’t see how we’d make it work, on the way to this viewing . Then we pulled up on the drive here and we both just fell silent. We knew straight away it was the one.’ Heide adds, ‘we wanted to be able to create an extension for a big kitchen/living space and we couldn’t have done that in the period properties we were looking at.
This house was not the prettiest but it had the most potential.’
When the couple got the keys, they instructed architecture and design practice Studio McW and interior designer Rebecca Wakefield of Studio Fortnum to work on the project. ‘I had worked with Studio McW previously, so they mentioned me to the clients,’ says Rebecca. ‘Ironically, the clients already knew me as we’d grown up in the same town and hung out as teenagers! It was wonderful to work with people I knew as I already had a decent grasp of their personalities – really helpful when designing their forever home.’
Rebecca wanted the transformation to feel sympathetic to the 18th-century building, but add elements of modern living, lots of lig
