At home with Garden designer Lucy Willcox

The green-fingered guru brought the outside in when she revamped her 1960s bungalow.

- By Lucy Pavia

Someone joked, 'your garden has a house,' says Lucy Willcox. In fact, her 1960s bungalow on the edge of Wimbledon Common is so enveloped in greenery — from the surrounding heathland to the high beech hedges which wrap around it — you'd be forgiven for thinking there wasn’t a house there at all. But cross the threshold of this newly renovated home and what quickly becomes clear is the award-winning garden designer also has a talent for interiors.

This is Willcox’s fourth renovation project. “I come from a family of makers,” she smiles, including four generations of bricklayers on one side of the family and parents who spent much of her childhood buying dilapidated houses and doing them up room by room; her mother is an interior designer. But although a newbuild home was never an option, this latest project was still a bit of a curveball.

“We thought we'd be in Highgate forever,” says Willcox of the Victorian terrace where she lived previously with her husband and two children, now 14 and 17. But when one of the four bungalows on Willcox’s parents’ road came up for sale, they decided to uproot to south London. Although “perfectly liveable”, the aesthetic of the house when they bought it felt odd, she says — a mix of English country interiors and a Japanese-inspired garden which “made me itch”.

Over six years of saving they hatched a plan to strip the house back to its mid-century roots. Her passion for this design era is clear the moment you enter the house, walking into a spacious, L-shaped living and dining area, with a curving, black brick fireplace and newly restored rosewood parquet floors.