In the hallway of Will and Sara Fuller’s home in Bath hangs an antique photograph; a view across the city taken from the top of a hill. It was a 40th birthday present from Sara to Will, a gift to stave off homesickness while the couple were living in Sydney, thousands of miles away from his family back in the West Country.

The couple, who met twenty years ago while Sara was studying in the UK, had moved back to her home country and started a family, with the intention that they would at some point return to England. The coronavirus pandemic proved to be the catalyst; when lockdowns in Australia became so strict that visiting their British relatives became practically impossible, they decided the time had come to relocate their family – two teenage daughters, two dogs and a cat – to Bath.

It was only once they had moved into this house – a golden Georgian terrace in the city’s vernacular style, a stone’s throw from the river Avon – that Sara and Will realised the view in the photograph was the same as the view from the windows. ‘It must have been taken from right outside the house’, says Sara, delighted. It was meant to be.

The couple moved into the house after a year of renting. ‘It was in desperate need of modernisation. Our girls would have walked straight out if they had the choice’, says Sara. Luckily, having worked as a project manager for the family’s construction company, Will could immediately see that it had ‘good bones’.

Work started on the house in June 2022, and not one to accept delays, Will made sure it was ready to move in just four months later. By September, the house had reached a ‘liveable’ condition, but Sara was determined to spend some time there before finalising many of the decorative decisions: ‘I really feel that you need to live in a place first, to get a feel for what will work’, she says.

The couple had been ‘carting around twenty years worth of stuff’ that they had collected, and were keen for a fresh start. When they moved, they took nothing more than one shipping container worth, which mostly consisted of artworks and one or two pieces of furniture they couldn’t part with. ‘In Australia, our house was very different’, explains Sara of their sunny, contemporary former home on the beach. ‘But we share a taste for very traditional design, and knew this was our opportunity to be bold and give it a slightly modern edge’.

In the sitting room, bright green walls painted in ‘Garden’ by Little Greene are vibrant but still sympathetic to the period of the house. The curtains, in Penny Morrison’s ‘Arabella Red’ fabric with their frilled pelmet are a concession to a more traditional style of decorating, but are balanced by layers of contrasting textiles by contemporary designers: the rug is from Nordic Knots, the lampshades are by Alice Palmer and the armchair is one of the few pieces of furniture that Sara brought with her from Australia. She had a loose cover made in a pink gingham fabric from Ian Mankin.