How do you make an 18th century stately home fit for a 21st-century family?

Ask anyone running a business and they’ll tell you that repeat custom is what it’s all about — the golden goose that, tended well, keeps on laying and laying. In the interior design world, this normally looks like finding clients with multiple houses to furnish, unless, that is, you’re Studio Cameron. ‘I don’t quite know how,’ says co-founder Toddy Fleming, but ‘somehow we’ve got our name out there for generational changeovers.’ In other words, the company’s stock in trade has become country houses, passing down through families and in need of new identities that make sense in the 21st century while respectfully honouring the past.

As you might imagine, many of these piles are not only in need of love, but careful phasing — a few rooms here can be done, a few rooms there, but then comes a break. The coffers must be refilled before the next stage can begin. Suddenly, what was one job becomes two, three, maybe more.

This was the case at The Hirsel, a Georgian stately home near Coldstream in the Scottish borders and a seat of the Earls of Home since the early 17th century. To date, Studio Cameron has completed six rooms for the current Earl and Countess, Michael and Sally Douglas-Home, and their three young children: a kitchen-breakfast room, a sitting room, boot room and three bedrooms, with another in the offing. But with near countless rooms across the vast building’s three floors, they have barely begun to scratch the surface.

Brought on in 2022, the brief for Toddy and her business partner Georgie Collingwood-Cameron was ostensibly simple: make the house fit for family life. The challenge, however, was that this house, once the residence of Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, 14th Earl of Home, had, like the rest of Britain’s stately homes, not exactly been designed with the joy and jumble of young children in mind. It had also never been finished. Toddy reveals there are 17th-century plans in Hirsel’s archive for a watchtower that never was. She also explains that the 14th Earl, Michael’s grandfather, pulled down great chunks of the house, but didn’t rebuild them. ‘I find it fascinating,’ she says. ‘It feels almost infinite, in a way, because it’s never actually been what it was intended to be.’

Of course, houses like this are infinite, or at least not definite, designed instead to transcend lifetimes; assigned not owners, but custodians for whom the idea of legacy looms larger than for most. It’s why their rooms feel frozen in time, less lived in than occupied, filled with hard-boned furniture and gimlet-eyed portraits. And this is precisely why what Studio Cameron has achieved at Hirsel is so remarkable: a series of comfortable, livable and inviting spaces that don’t stand on ceremony, but still speak fluently the language of the great British country house.

Conceiving the project as ‘an apartment within the house’, Toddy set about reworking a dated lino-floored upstairs kitchenette — presumably used by Home forebears for little more than making the odd cup of tea — applying for permission to knock through into the sitting room next door (above). While the family’s meals are still made in the main kitchen downstairs, this space, with its convivial curved banquette, round dining table and plenty of countertop space for mixing drinks, has been transformed into something light, bright and genuinely useful.

The sitting room (above and main image), meanwhile, is a masterclass in melding old and new — something Toddy says is crucial when looking to create legible ‘balance’ in a room.

Her client, the Countess of Home, is ‘quite a modern girl at heart’, but conscious of the framework in which they were working, the studio were careful to steer her where necessary. This has resulted in a layered approach that finds expression in the introduction of antiques — often sourced in the north Northumberland market town of Wooler, Toddy’s best-kept secret when it comes to second-hand — and timeless textiles by the likes of Nicole Fabre and Flora Soames. These, Toddy feels, ‘bridge the gap somewhat’. They feel familiar to the country house aesthetic and fresh. (Note, for instance, the curtains: almost contemporary in the elegant plain whiteness, were it not for a leading edge of rust and indigo ‘Lynxia’, a Robert Kime textile inspired by a fragment of 19th-century Chinese silk embroidery.) It’s also discernible in the combination of, say, an existing sofa, its handsomely heavy fringing repaired, with a new ottoman by Clock House Furniture and a pair of wavy-edged occasional tables on castors designed by Studio Cameron. These have been stained a rich blue so as not to compete with the antiques and now stand in merry juxtaposition to the exquisitely moulded Georgian fire surround.

The tables speak to the sense of fun and character Toddy was intent on introducing to the rooms at Hirsel. In one of the children’s rooms, the designer worked with a local cabinetmaker named Philip Hitchcock to build the box bed of dreams for any little girl, topped with an ogee arch, fitted with shelves for books and favoured teddies, and finished by decorative painter Katie Forbes.

A different cabinetmaker, Sculleries of Stockbridge, who also designed the kitchen, created the boot room. Perhaps surprisingly in a building of this size, ‘the greatest challenge here was storage,’ reveals Toddy. ‘You’d think there would be enough cupboards in this house, but they’re full — just rammed with the most incredible antiques and silverware.’ (Incidentally, the 14th Earl’s red ministerial despatch box is still kept in the house, though on a chair, rather than squirrelled away.) Among the more awkward items Toddy was charged with finding a home for were the family’s cork-handled fishing rods (the Hirsel Estate owns private rights on the River Tweed). Rather than hiding them in a cabinet, she and Sculleries of Stockbridge devised a pair of notched holders as an elegant solution that celebrates their beauty in the process. These are, admits Toddy, ‘perhaps my favourite things in the whole project’.

Another thing she has enjoyed is witnessing the evolution of Lady Douglas-Home’s own style, something she says she finds reassuring for the remainder of the project. ‘She’s definitely getting braver,’ Toddy says — only a good thing, presumably, when there are so many rooms at Hirsel yet to be tackled. Toddy references an artwork that her client chose and was particularly excited about: an exquisite floral plaster relief by Imprint Casts that hangs in the sitting room. Like Hirsel’s historic portraits and existing antiques, ‘it is special; the kind of thing that will be kept by the family for a very long time and that, I think, rather sums up what we’ve tried to do here,’ says Toddy. ‘We’ve put in bones for the next generation. Someone might change some furnishings or swap a countertop, but I hope that we’ve managed to create something that will stand the test of time.’

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It’s an admirable aim — and, looking at all Studio Cameron has done at Hirsel, one it feels like they have achieved. Repeat custom is definitely deserved.