‘Why would anyone paint anything white?’ Step inside Butter Wakefield's colourful west London home
Grace McCloud talks to the American interior and garden designer Butter Wakefield about her London home and how the inside and outside inform one another. Photographs by Milo Brown.
The day before we meet, Butter Wakefield has been speaking to Farrow & Ball’s team at their Dorset headquarters about how she uses colour outside. She seems surprised that they’d be interested to hear from ‘little old me’, but there is surely nobody better suited to the job: Butter has, for more than 15 years, been at the helm of her eponymous garden-design studio; before that, she was an interior designer at Colefax & Fowler, a job she landed when she moved to London from her native USA, where she’d worked at Christie’s. She has, in short, spent her career engaging with beautiful, colourful things, figuring out how they work, both inside the house and out.
Her own home in west London’s Ravenscourt Park is a summation of her years of experience, and you feel it before you’ve even walked through the front door — one painted a green so ebulliently vernal that joy seems to emanate from behind before Butter has even unlatched it, open-armed and beaming.
There's a wonderful sense of green throughout Butter's home — starting at the front door.
She moved here with her then-husband in 1991, pregnant with their second baby. Working for Colefax & Fowler at the time, ‘I had a real sense of how I wanted things to be done, but we didn’t have the money to do it all in one go.’ It was, she said, actually rather helpful: ‘It made me understand the value of absolutely everything. When we got some cash together, we could do the next step. Drip, drip, drip — redo a bathroom here, paint a room there, that kind of thing.’
She learned to prioritise and very soon realised that at the top of her list was getting rid of the white paint on the Victorian building’s exteriors. ‘Why would anyone paint anything white?’ she asks, genuinely confused. ‘Especially outside, where it stands out like a sore thumb and looks filthy almost immediately.’ Again, working in stages, Butter began with the back of the house, pairing its London stock brickwork with the lead grey of Farrow & Ball’s Downpipe, a choice she remains thrilled with all these years later. ‘It’s like mascara for the windows,’ she says with a smile.
The front of the house wasn’t repainted until later, when ingressing water from a leak forced her hand. ‘I should have perhaps warned my neighbours that I was about to go a little off-piste,’ Butter laughs, ‘but I was just so over the white stucco on our street that I just went for it,’ colourwashing anything not brick in Farrow & Ball’s Hardwick White (a misnomer, really, because it’s more a chalky grey).
These paint choices form part of what Butter calls the house’s ‘colour story’, something she describes as the ‘direct conversation between the interior of a house and its outside.’ Hardwick White, for instance, is the hue she chose for her conservatory too, evidence that Butter is big on the idea that a house should sing as a whole, as well as in parts: ‘You create views internally, linking rooms through motifs or colours or fabrics,’ she explains, ‘and I believe the same principle applies outside. You should look through the window, whether you’re standing inside or out, and be able to see the two spaces in dialogue with one another.’
The master bedroom is one of the house's more restrained room, using subtler shades of green.
In her job, Butter is always taking a read on what’s going on in the rooms that overlook the garden, ensuring the colours complement one another. A significant driver of this, she says, is ‘so that you can pick flowers and bring them inside, knowing they’ll work beautifully.’ Butter — sunny, colourful and full of enthusiasm — is unsurprisingly a great believer in having cut flowers indoors: ‘They’re so good for you, creatively. Working with a vase of flowers is just the nicest thing. And if you’ve got a garden full of them, why wouldn’t you want them inside with you? I’m always trying to convince my clients to pick their flowers.’
Also unsurprising is the garden designer’s fixation with the colour green, which appears in ‘absolutely every room’ in some way small or large, and its ability to both soothe and enliven. This is perhaps best in evidence in her bedroom and bathroom, both of which speak to the sympathetic powers of decorating more generally. After Butter’s marriage came to an end in 2016 and her ex-husband moved out, she very sensibly set about redoing — and in the process reclaiming — those two most intimate spaces. Her bedroom, now a confection of softest sage, neutral linen and — for Butter, at least — relatively little pattern, is a haven of the sort that makes you exhale as you step inside, which was ‘the most important thing’ in those stressful, sleep-deprived days. ‘That room has seen me through my lowest moments,’ she says with the utmost sincerity.
Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Butter swapped robust marble and crenellated mouldings for a scheme infinitely prettier and more feminine, in the form of grass-green wooden dado panelling, Blithfield’s blockprinted Medallions wallpaper (green, of course) and ‘a really fantastic tub’ with antique brass fittings. It is — you guessed it — painted green (racing, this time). Now, emerald majolica and shimmering pink Sunderland lustreware join framed botanicals and mirrors in ebony-stained frames to form a gallery of Butter’s favourite things, admired everyday from her evening bath.
These rooms are, like all the others in the house, an alloy of different aspects of Butter’s personality. It is bright, busy and cluttered, but it’s also perfectly put together. Butter’s jostling shelves and walls are not rammed, but rather arranged with a miscellany of things she loves, whether that’s chromatic, garden-focused Modern British-ish paintings by the likes of John Pawle, Kirsty Wither, Vanessa Bowman and Nick Botting, or the cheery cast of Beswick porcelain Beatrix Potter characters that keep their twinkly eyes over the spare room, papered in Nicholas Herbert’s butter-yellow bunny-dotted ‘Toile des Lapins’ and now largely slept in by her grandchildren. She is refreshingly unsnobbish about what makes her happy.
She can afford to be. Butter’s eye is unerring. She owes much of this to her training at a golden period in Colefax’s history, working at the company’s celebrated showroom on Brook Street with the likes of decorating royalty Imogen Taylor, Roger Banks-Pye, Tom Parr and Wendy Nicholls. ‘It was wonderful,’ she says, ‘and it was terrifying. But if you paid attention you could learn so much.’ She credits her stint at Christie’s beforehand — along with her grandmother’s ‘immaculate’ taste — with ‘opening my eyes to beautiful things, from silver to porcelain, rugs and furniture’, but it was on Brook Street she really learned the principles of scale, texture, colour and pattern.
Desiring more flexibility after the birth of her son Kit — and finding ‘the farm girl from rural Maryland in me calling out’ — Butter left Colefax and found gardening, something she calls ‘the third leg of the stool’ in her life. She trained at the English Gardening School in the late 90s and later went on to graduate from the London College of Garden Design, while juggling the running of her own business with the busyness that comes with four children. It has, she says, ‘been such a happy thing for me’. As with her house, Butter’s own garden is a distillation of both her knowledge and her enthusiasms: water features (‘you’ll never regret having one’) and pollinator-friendly planting (‘it’s all of our responsibility’), products made by, where possible, English manufacturers. And — of course — colour. Her latest ‘thing’ is positioning pots in flowerbeds, providing large and concentrated explosions of excitement at eye-height.
The strip of wildflower meadow down the centre of the garden is a unique and inspired design decision — it's also very bee friendly.
In keeping with the rest of the house, Butter’s garden is loose, romantic and vibrant. The influence of the gardens she most admires — Great Dixter, Sissinghurst, Benton End among them — is keenly felt. Though long and relatively narrow, like so many London plots, the rectangular site is far from conventional, spliced down the middle by a slender, metre-wide sliver of wildflower meadow, whose oxeye daisies and Verbena bonariensis frolic in the slightest breeze, thrumming with the bumblebuzz of buglife. The beds, which spill into turfed corridors either side, are generous and painterly; in spring, when I visit, this means frilly tulips in lipstick shades, geums of peach and tangerine and the sunny-skied froth of Brunnera macrophylla, adrift in a sea of greens of every intensity.
Though she was yet to establish her business when she moved here, Butter — surely inspired by her beloved grandfather, a wonderful plantsman — knew there was a gorgeous garden to be made. It was, in fact, what drew her to the house more than anything, the appeal being its west-facing aspect. I’m surprised; surely south-facing is what everybody wants? ‘No! North is better than south, curiously, as it’s not so dry, and in summertime, you get late sun. East is nice for morning light, but west is best: all the light ends up here at the end of the day. For most of us, working during the week and busy at the weekends, that’s the time we spend in our gardens.’
By summer, of course, the garden will feel like a different room entirely, filled with hydrangeas, digitalis and blousy English roses — Wollerton Old Hall, Bathsheba, Roald Dahl, Gertrude Jekyll and Boscobel — and acid shocks of Alchemilla mollis. The same goes for autumn and beyond. No doubt next year there’ll be something new to enjoy and experiment with. Just as the inveterate decorator in Butter knows a house is never really finished, she knows all too well that this verdant patch of west London is her ‘very own Forth Bridge; you get to what you think is the last thing and then you've got to start again,’ she laughs. ‘If you don’t buy into that, well… where’s the joy?’ And, if there’s anything Butter’s home teaches us, it’s that joy is what it’s all about.
