A PASTORAL PLAYGROUND

Out of an ancestral millhouse, designer MARY GRAHAM raises a new family home in the country, alive with checks, florals, and ruffles

- JO RODGERS

CRUNCHING OVER GRAVEL toward a gray, pebble dash millhouse on an exposed slope above the River Ure, set in traditional farmland in the north of England, Mary Graham prepared to see her soon-to-be home. She and her husband, Sam, had known the house at a distance for years-Sam's parents have a farmhouse half a mile away, and his uncle Sir James Graham lives at Norton Conyers, a nearby estate with Dutch-style gables that might have inspired Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre. "There are cousins and other Grahams tucked everywhere and have been since 1624. It would have been a great surprise if we'd gone anywhere else," says Mary, cofounder of the London-based interior design firm Salvesen Graham with partner Nicole Salvesen. The house had been let to tenants by Sam's parents, and it wasn't until he and Mary were chewing over a move from south London to Yorkshire, in the winter of 2018, that they stood in the frowsy front hall and saw rocks ahead.