A 19th-century stately home in Lancashire belonging to wallpaper designer Mia Reay

Whittington Hall and its surrounding estate, set amongst gentle undulating hills, straddles the three counties of Lancashire, Cumbria and Yorkshire. The Jacobethan-style house was designed in the 1830s by David Webster, the celebrated Kendal-based architect, and features his usual defining hallmarks: a gabled facade, a battlement tower, asymmetrical turrets and tall windows that maximise light.

Wallpaper designer Mia Reay, who founded her eponymous wallpaper company here in 2022, came to live here in 2013, two years after she had married Aeneas Mackay, Lord Reay, head of the Mackay Clan, of Scottish and Dutch descent. Aeneas' father had died and the couple inherited the house. ‘It was daunting at first, as asbestos had been detected around the plumbing and the whole ground floor had to be replaced,’ recalls Mia. ‘We brought in wide honey coloured oak floor boards from Poland to lighten the feel,’ she adds. ‘I wanted to use hand painted wallpapers – I had always loved painting and I realised it was more cost effective to create my own,’ she explains. ‘My friends wanted them too and my business was born.’ The beauty of nature, historical designs, fragments of fabrics and ceramics have been an unfailing source of inspiration for Mia's parchment-like papers, many of which now adorn the house.

Helsinki-born Mia had lived in Finland, Saudi Arabia and Spain with her parents, and after university at Trinity College Cambridge, she worked in finance and fashion in London. Total immersion in these diverse cultures has informed the way they live in the house: her first move, to the delight of her growing family, was to install a large sauna by the indoor pool. Rather than using the house’s grand entrance, with its marble staircase overlooking the Lune Valley across a box parterre of the family crest, you enter the house today on the east side. Parallel to the kitchen, the hall is full of family wellies, dog bowls, fishing and shooting paraphernalia, all set against Mia's joyous ‘Bukhara’ wallpaper.

A symphony of off whites greets you in the kitchen. Creamware Wedgwood platers, buried by Aeneas' great grandmother in the grounds of their Dutch home during the occupation and retrieved after the war, sit on a shelf above the aga. The Ikea chairs with their plush cushions and the French farmhouse table painted white continue the delicate interplay.