Interior designer Amanda Ransom has sensitively restored her Tudor home, filling it with a curation of pieces that sit comfortably with its ancient origins
FEATURE AMANDA HARLING PHOTOGRAPHY ANDREAS VON EINSIEDEL
Moving into a spouse’s family home would be a daunting prospect for most, but interior designer Amanda Ransom has updated and extended the Tudor farmhouse in Hertfordshire she lives in with her husband and their son Edward with great sensitivity. This doubtless stems from her wide-ranging knowledge of historic style and architectural detail. “I used to work in finance, but my first love was always interiors. I read History of Art at university and became hooked on classical architecture – an understanding of classical proportion and rules underlies a lot of my interior work. When the banking crisis struck, it felt like the right time to leave the City and return to what I loved, so I enrolled on the Architectural Interior Design course at the Inchbald School of Design in central London.”
Amanda’s in-laws bought the 16th-century farmhouse during the 1960s and brought up their family there. With members of her husband’s family living nearby, the couple decided to move out from London following the birth of their son, knowing that the house would make an ideal family home and the adjacent barn could be repurposed to provide Amanda with an office and some showroom space for her interior design business.
There had been remarkably few alterations made to the house over the centuries, as Amanda explains: “When we moved here in December of 2010, the temperature inside the house was –13°C, so I did wonder if we’d ever manage to warm up as we had no central heating. Our first priority was therefore to install heating. Alongside that, we were allowed to partially take down a dividing wall between the kitchen and a small sitting room in the oldest part of the house, dating from around 1580, to create a spacious family kitchen with a table for informal meals.”
A single-storey extension accommodating the spacious library off the kitchen was added to the house at the same time to replace the small sitting room and provide space for Edward to play. Old fragments of carved oak that had been stored in a barn for years were repurposed to create a period-style fireplace
which led to the decision to panel the room below the dado.
The dining and drawing rooms at the opposite end of the house date from 1620. “Generally, my guiding principle is that the interior of a period home should look as if it has evolved over generations rather than a matter of weeks,” Amanda says. “When working
