An exuberantly offbeat north London house by Rachel Chudley

In this corner of north London, the streets are lined with doll’s-house-like villas with handsome Victorian façades – the sort of places in which characters from an Oscar Wilde play might happily reside. But the traditional exterior of one house in particular belies the offbeat rooms within. Lucy and Adam Tudhope’s home is a far cry from nineteenth-century England; conjured from the imagination of Rachel Chudley, it is an exuberant hymn to daring design.

In 2013, Rachel spent a month touring the US with the British band Mumford & Sons, sourcing props and creating costumes for their stage shows alongside the immersive theatre specialist Reuben Feels. It was then that she met Lucy and Adam – the band’s manager. ‘I can’t tell you why, but I remember thinking even then that this was a fateful moment,’ she recalls.

Two years passed before she set up her interior-design practice and it was not long after this that Lucy spotted her on Instagram. ‘We were looking to redecorate our old house, so I called her and we clicked instantly,’ says Lucy. ‘The design process had already begun when we then decided to buy our current house, so the project turned from a revamp into a head-to-toe refurbishment.’ Rachel attributes the Tudhopes’ decision to hire her to their instinct for nurturing young talent – Adam’s line of work being a case in point. ‘They were some of the first people to believe in me,’ she says ‘They wanted an interior that would bring delight to their lives on a daily basis, and I think they enjoyed the rawness of the experience.’

As a fledgling interior designer, this was Rachel’s biggest job to date but, as she is the first to point out, it was a collaborative process with the architect Duncan Woodburn and the builder Matt Elgood, who helped provide solutions for some of her wilder ideas. ‘The project was such a pleasure to be a part of because no one was precious about their role in it,’ says Lucy. Notably, it was Duncan who came up with the Heath Robinson-style laundry chute from the children’s bedrooms to the utility room below, as well as the button-activated bookcase that retracts to reveal a secret set of stairs to a playroom in the attic – surely the stuff of dreams for the Tudhopes’ two young sons.

However, examples of Rachel’s design bravura are also plentiful throughout. Should you decide to chop off the top three floors of the house, remove the interior walls and peer down to the ground floor, you would see a map of the Catskill Mountains in south-eastern New York state, where the family has a cabin, denoted by different shades of concrete and slices of brass inlay. A small brass dot in the floor of the kitchen marks the exact location of the cabin. It is a wonderfully thoughtful and highly original concept, which, given the fact the map cannot be seen even when you are inside the house, hints at the unconventional brilliance and boundlessness of Rachel’s imagination.