Crunching over gravel toward a gray, pebble dash millhouse on an exposed slope above the River Ure, set in traditional farmland in the north of England, Mary Graham prepared to see her soon-to-be home. She and her husband, Sam, had known the house at a distance for years—Sam’s parents have a farmhouse half a mile away, and his uncle Sir James Graham lives at Norton Conyers, a nearby estate with Dutch-style gables that might have inspired Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre.

“There are cousins and other Grahams tucked everywhere and have been since 1624. It would have been a great surprise if we’d gone anywhere else,” says Mary, cofounder of the London-based interior design firm Salvesen Graham with partner Nicole Salvesen.

The house had been let to tenants by Sam’s parents, and it wasn’t until he and Mary were chewing over a move from south London to Yorkshire, in the winter of 2018, that they stood in the frowsy front hall and saw rocks ahead.

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“I can say this now,” says Mary, “because my husband’s family knows, but that first day was somewhat overwhelming.” The house was crowded by brushy leylandii trees, which blocked the light and the big-sky views of grazing sheep, arable farmland, and lakes.

Inside, the layout was pleasingly symmetrical, but the rooms were bleak. Groundwater was seeping underfoot because it turned out that there wasn’t a foundation, and the walls were spotted with mold.

Beneath the dust-colored pebble dash, the exterior structure was made of cobbles from the local riverbed, plus “bits of wood, newspapers stuffed into the cracks, probably anything they found lying around,” says Mary. “We thought about taking the render off of the walls, but we discovered that if we took it off, the house would fall down.”

The main staircase, with its English elm handrail, was preserved, along with a handful of paneled doors, but for the most part Mary worked from scratch. “I was a little relieved that everything needed to be ripped out honestly, because it gave me license to make changes without feeling guilty. In our business you don’t like to discard things that are good quality just for the sake of having something new.”

Portions of the house are believed to date to the 18th century, but it is too humble for historical designation, so alterations were more straightforward than they would have been for something higher up the architectural pecking order.

Builders glided into action in the summer of 2019, stripping the walls and reinstalling the electrics, dismantling an out-of-commission Aga range, and working to make the floors watertight. The facade was repainted a cheerier shade of pale shrimp.

Mary, Sam, their two young children, and an au pair bunked with Sam’s parents to keep an eye on the first wave of renovations, which were completed “by Christmas Eve, a deadline you tell clients never to have. We were camping.”

When it came to the interiors, Mary’s brief for herself was to create a traditional home that felt at ease in the ancestral landscape—not completely devoid of formality (see the china pots of geraniums; frilly eiderdowns thick as dictionaries; floral armchairs with generous dust ruffles) but with enough pattern, texture, and squish (sofa-wise) for family life.

A collection of Masons Ironstone jugs is displayed in the kitchen above a workaday dog bed filled with a plaid blanket and a doe-eyed miniature dachshund called Connie. In the drawing room there’s a box of cards for charades under the gaze of a stuffed barn owl, perched to the left of a woodburning stove.

The club fender in front of the stove is covered in an antique paisley shawl bought at auction. “My plan was to use it as a bedcover,” says Mary, “but it was covered with moth holes so I couldn’t.”

Beyond appearances, the aim was to arrange the house for rural living—a place that accommodates dripping swimsuits in the boot room and relatives dropping in (“my mother-in-law and I started out saying we would always give each other notice, but we let that go”).

There are baskets hanging from the ceiling to collect apples and damsons from an orchard planted by a previous tenant (“the farmer’s wife—she was called Mrs. English”) in the 1960s. “I suppose I wanted to try to maintain a slightly old-fashioned way of life through my decorating,” says Mary.

“It feels very lucky to give my children the kind of upbringing that other families in this house probably had—for a while at least, until they’re unleashed on the world.”

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Featured in our September/October 2023 issue. Interior Design by Salvesen Graham; Photography by Simon Brown; Styling by Olivia Gregory; Written by Jo Rodgers.