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In the studio with Nicola Harding
The British interior designer, who has lent her magic to many a Meanwhile space, talks achieving the “peculiar alchemy” that makes a lived environment feel homely, comforting, and characterful.
When it comes to making a house – or any space, in fact – feel like a home, no one does it better than British interior designer Nicola Harding, who is renowned for creating richly layered environments that are simultaneously warm, atmospheric and visually delightful. She describes the process of conjuring up a homely environment as a “peculiar alchemy”, and she and her studio, Nicola Harding & Co., have applied their brand of alchemical wizardry across a variety of different project types, from private homes to noted hotels, as well as many Meanwhile spaces. And, no matter how big or small the site, or whether her client is an individual or a brand, the result is always wonderfully intimate, comforting and personality-infused.
Harding’s desire to create these kinds of interiors stems from her own childhood. “My father was a helicopter pilot and I grew up in these military houses where not only was everyone's house the same, but they also had standard-issue furniture,” she tells Meanwhile. “I always craved a sense of home, a feeling of belonging.” As a child, her favourite place to visit was the Yorkshire home of her godfather, a house she describes as being “stuffed to the gills with antiques and all sorts of other things – some quite valuable and others that cost pennies from a flea market.” The house was an incredibly soulful one, she explains, and helped her to pinpoint what she was looking for in a dwelling. “It was so layered and full of stories, with a real sense of history, of permanence.”
That a house could evoke and encompass all these feelings was a revelation for Harding, and, to this day, the starting point for each Nicola Harding & Co. project is what sensations her clients want their spaces to generate, as well as how those spaces can best serve their needs. “Of course, we’ll ask clients about what they want their home to look like,” says Harding, “but we really encourage them to think about how they want to live, and how the environment we’re creating can bring that to bear.” She will often pose emotive questions, she explains, to unearth clients’ “deeply held fantasies”. This might be how they picture putting their children to bed, or what they want to come home to on a Friday night – “whether that’s inviting a big gang of friends round for dinner in a formal dining room or sinking into a comfortable chair by a fireplace, alone, and feeling very held by a small room.”
For our work with Scape, we've been thinking about how the environments we create can help people be their best selves. As humans, we’re striving for that more and more – to learn more, to practise crafts or have a side hustle, so at Scape we’re creating everything from crafting suites to blogging booths and places people can take over to host a dinner party or a meeting.
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Giving precedence to the spaces that users or inhabitants will spend the most time in is key to how the interior designer re-envisions a site’s layout. “If you spend a lot of time washing, ironing and putting things away, for example, then it’s important to make the place you do that a nice one, in a light, spacious part of the building. It makes sense to spend more money there than perhaps you would on a formal living room you’ll rarely use,” she says. It’s also possible to use a site’s floor plan to help facilitate an improved lifestyle, she adds. “For our work with Scape, we've been thinking about how the environments we create can help people be their best selves. As humans, we’re striving for that more and more – to learn more, to practise crafts or have a side hustle, so at Scape we’re creating everything from crafting suites to blogging booths and places people can take over to host a dinner party or a meeting.”
Once a project’s floor plan is established, the next stage is, of course, the design and decoration. In order to forge a meaningful connection between an interior and its inhabitants, Harding begins by defining a sense of place. This requires research into the history of the building or site to better understand its pre-existing vernacular, be that period or location, and subtly integrating elements of that into the design. As the Nicola Harding & Co. website reiterates: “Once the quiet language that underpins the scheme is established, on a subliminal level, the place feels like it makes sense.” In the same way, when Harding is working with a private client, she strives to find out more about them, sourcing a collection of relevant furniture, fabrics and objects thereafter to lend what she terms “emotional durability” (a term coined by sustainable design expert Jonathan Chapman) to the space. That could be furniture made by local craftspeople, or an antique piece with a provenance close to where the client grew up. “It’s about there being some intelligence to the scheme that has meaningful roots to people and place.”
The merging of antique and salvaged finds with bespoke craftsmanship is a signature aspect of Harding’s style. “Those pieces have a narrative you can engage with,” she says passionately. “Plus we need to support British craftsmanship – we have this incredible heritage and we’re holding onto it by our fingernails!” Merging the old with the new serves another purpose, too, she explains, in that it makes a space harder to date, and thus more likely to stand the test of time – “I hate the idea of doing things that are trend led!”
Another defining facet of Harding’s designs is a thoughtful yet playful use of colour, texture, shape and pattern to enliven a space, and add moments of what she calls “mischief”. Cinema serves as a big inspiration here. “Set design and location choices are all about conjuring atmosphere, setting a mood,” she explains. “So making the most of subtle levers for nostalgia, things that take you emotionally down a certain road, from colour combinations to shapes, can be very powerful.” Speaking on colour specifically, she expands: “I believe that colour nurtures the soul. It can be used to enhance the natural qualities of a space or conceal them. I also enjoy unexpected colour combinations – like an energising pop of acid yellow or red in a soft pink, otherwise serene living room. I often look to fashion for ideas as new concepts tend to filter in from there before they come to interiors.”
According to Harding, rooms we’re more likely to spend time in after dark are ripe for the application of much deeper shades than those we spend more time in in daylight, while the duration of time spent in certain areas can also influence the choice of hues. “Hallways or spare bathrooms – places you don’t tend to linger – present a great opportunity for some really strong colour,” she says. “Whereas somewhere that you’re in a lot, like a kitchen, you perhaps want a much simpler palette. ” The aim, Harding stresses, is to create different tempos in different rooms so that you can serve the different needs you may have at different times of the day or year, or when you’re in a specific mood. Ultimately, she posits, good interior design about creating emotionally enduring spaces that reflect and hold their inhabitants over time, making real life “as easy, comfortable and joyful as possible”.
View more of Nicola's work on her website - https://nicolaharding.com/
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