A west London house by designer Jessica Summer that is as serene as it is practical

Good design is often a question of getting the balance right – of striking that fine line between the practical and beautiful, the artful and simple, the old and new. It’s a line that interior designer Jessica Summer has navigated with great sensitivity at this recent project of hers, a four floor Victorian townhouse in west London. Its owners – an academic and her husband, who works in finance – wanted a robust home for their growing family that would be as practical as was beautiful. By chance, the husband happened to already know Jessica after the two studied at the same university, but the couple only approached her after they visited a house in south-east London where she had already worked her magic, creating a timeless interior, underpinned by a strong attention to detail and a considered palette. ‘They called me up and said this is what we want,’ recalls Jessica, who honed her eye working for studios including Rose Uniacke and P. Joseph before setting up on her own in 2022.

When Jessica joined the project, the plan was for a smaller-scale project, focussing on a few rooms, but nine-months into design work and with builders on site, it became an entire house renovation. Even though she hadn’t expected to be overhauling the whole space – her fledgling studio had taken on two more projects in this time, including one in the States – she happily accepted the challenge. ‘By this point, we’d really worked out the look and feel of the interior and knew it was all about bringing texture and layers into the space,’ she explains. ‘It was about striking the balance between it being an old house, with a new spirit.’

New came in the form of a soaring double-height barrel-vaulted glazed extension at the back of the house, which now accommodates the kitchen-dining area and runs across the lower ground and ground floors. ‘We talked right at the beginning about the pinch points and linearity typical to a London house,’ recalls Jessica, who worked closely with CKW Architects to bring her architectural interventions to life, including the addition of a roof terrace on the top floor. ‘Not only does the lower ground extension flood the house with light, but by pushing through the roof you’re exposed to this whole other volume,’ she explains. ‘It takes away any sense of low or narrow proportions.’ It also provided the ideal spot for 7 metres high worth of bookshelves, designed to accommodate the owner's vast collection of books. ‘Her husband joked that she had more books than the British Library and the space has filled up pretty quickly,’ says Jessica.

Elsewhere, new interventions, designed to create a serene, cohesive backdrop, were a little more subtle. Although few architectural details remained, Jessica reinstated what she could by adding deep cornices, architraves and elegant new doors to give the house a quiet grandeur. Aside from downstairs, the layout stayed largely the same, with a study and double living room on the raised ground floor and four bedrooms spread across the upper two floors. In the extension, Jessica deployed textures to soften the contemporary architecture. Hand-aged oak floors, laid as if they could have always been there, but crucially with gaps small enough to ensure a stray piece of spaghetti wouldn’t end up wedged there, ground the space, while beams were also added to the kitchen ceiling to create visual interest. Jessica had the idea of creating a black kitchen – but even in that there is texture, through the ebonised oak fronts and oak-topped island. ‘What’s great about the fronts is that unlike painted ones, they don’t chip,’ explains Jessica.