Domestic Bliss

Actor Michelle Dockery calls on designer Emma Ainscough to help colorfully update a Victorian house in a leafy London neighborhood

- TEXT BY FIONA MCCARTHY PHOTOGRAPHY BY KENSINGTON LEVERNE STYLED BY OLIVIA GREGORY

A set of pistachio-green Crittall doors sealed the deal when British actor Michelle Dockery and her producer husband Jasper Waller-Bridge found their dream home five years ago in a leafy neighborhood of west London.

“I really fell in love with them,” says Dockery with the same soothing but more urban than clipped vowels of her cinematic alter ego Lady Mary Crawley of Downton Abbey fame. “They were just so unusual and so rare to find in a color like that.”

Those doors came to define what would unwittingly become a four-year renovation plan, informing both the color palette and upbeat spirit imbued throughout the house with help from London-based interior designer Emma Ainscough. “We started out just doing some aesthetic changes, adding curtains and changing colors in rooms,” Dockery recalls. But eventually, despite the previous owners having done “an amazing job modernizing what was apparently a house stuck in the ’70s, we wanted to make it feel more our own.”

Ainscough, a Studio Ashby alum who launched her solo design practice in 2020, took those distinctive doors as a starting point for the scheme of gentle greens, blues, and golden yellows—interjected with bold jolts of cherry and crimson. Dockery loves a “pop of red,” the designer notes. “I read about the ‘unexpected red theory’ in a home a while ago,” agrees Dockery. “It said you can put red anywhere, maybe a lamp or chair, and it brightens up a space, so most of the rooms have something red in them.”