Interior home design that’s bold and makes room for colour.
There is something incredibly satisfying about working with a client who already knows that they do not want their home to disappear quietly into a sea of safe choices.
From our earliest meetings with Georgia and her family, there was a warmth and energy that made the possibilities for Derbyshire Whare feel wide open. They were fun, vibrant and curious, with an appreciation for good energy, beautiful art, rich textures and the kind of comfort that makes a home feel generous and easy to live in. Rather than arriving with a fixed idea of what everything needed to become, they were interested in exploring what was possible, which gave us the freedom to imagine a home that could hold all of that personality while still feeling considered and connected.
That is often where our role as interior designers becomes most valuable.
It is not always about arriving with an entirely new vision and asking a client to leave everything they love behind. Sometimes the more interesting work is in listening carefully to what is already there, understanding the pieces someone is naturally drawn towards, and then creating enough structure around those instincts that they begin to feel confident, intentional and connected.
The Derbyshire Whare became exactly that kind of project.
Designing a home around the people who live there.
We have never believed that every home needs to look as though it belongs to the same person.
Homes are deeply personal places, and when we begin working with a family, we are interested in far more than what colour they might like on the walls or which kitchen image they have saved on Pinterest. We want to understand how they live, where they naturally gather, which rooms are doing too much and which areas of the home are being avoided.
Our work with the Derbyshire Whanau was about looking at the home more holistically and identifying where relatively considered changes could make the existing house work better, while also giving Georgia permission to bring more of her own curious ideas into the interiors.
Rather than approaching every room as a completely separate exercise, we developed a broader direction for the home, looking at colour, materiality, the relationship between spaces and the way each decision would contribute to the overall feeling of the house.
There needed to be continuity, but continuity did not mean everything had to match.
That distinction became important throughout the project, because some rooms could carry stronger colour and a little more character, while others needed to sit more quietly beside them. When those relationships are thought about carefully, a house can hold many different moods without ever feeling disconnected.
Making room for colour
Colour can be one of the most transformative tools available to us in an interior, and yet it is also one of the areas where homeowners often become the most nervous.
There is usually a moment somewhere in the process where the practical questions begin to creep in. Will this be too much? Will I get sick of it? Should we choose something safer? What happens if this colour dates?
Those are completely understandable questions, particularly when people are investing significant money into their homes, but we also think there is a danger in allowing the fear of making the wrong choice to become the thing that makes every decision for you.
A home can be beautifully designed and technically resolved, yet still feel strangely anonymous if every choice has been made according to what feels safest.
At the Derbyshire Whare, colour was not introduced simply because we wanted the house to feel bold. It became a way of creating atmosphere, defining different spaces and bringing depth into the home, while allowing Georgia’s natural sense of personality to come through.
The important part was understanding how those colours would behave alongside one another, how they would change as natural light moved through the house, and how finishes, furniture, cabinetry and the existing architecture could help either soften or strengthen them.
When colour is approached in that way, it stops being something decorative that is added at the end and instead becomes part of the architecture of how a room feels.
Not everything needs to be replaced
One of the things we enjoy about renovation work is finding the point between what genuinely needs to change and what simply needs to be seen differently.
There can be a temptation, particularly when looking at beautifully photographed interiors online, to believe that a successful renovation requires stripping everything away and beginning again. Sometimes that is absolutely the right response, but often there are parts of an existing home that are already working well and can become the foundation for something much stronger with the right changes around them.
At Derbyshire Whare, our thinking included the kitchen, bathrooms and the wider colour direction of the home, looking carefully at where intervention would create the greatest improvement rather than automatically assuming every existing element had reached the end of its life.
For us, that is part of responsible design as much as it is practical design. A renovation budget should be spent where it will genuinely improve the way a home functions and feels, and sometimes restraint is just as important as knowing when to make a bigger move.
The goal was never to make the house unrecognisable.
It was to draw more potential out of what was already there.
A home does not have to follow the crowd
One of the questions we hear often when discussing a stronger design choice is whether something will date.
It is an interesting question because, of course, interiors do change over time and our tastes shift alongside the way we live, but trends are not the only thing that date a home. There is also something very particular about a space designed entirely around what was considered universally acceptable at one moment in time.
We are far more interested in asking whether a decision feels right for the person who will live with it every day.
That does not mean ignoring longevity or practicality. Quite the opposite. Good interior design involves thinking carefully about both, but longevity can come from more than choosing the most neutral option available. It can also come from understanding yourself well enough to know the difference between something you are temporarily being influenced by and something you have genuinely loved for years.
Georgia brought that sense of self to this project, which allowed us to work with her, encourage curiosity and provoke new ideas.
There is confidence in a home that reflects the people who live there, and that confidence is often what gives an interior its warmth.
The designers role is not to replace the client
We talk a lot at NEST about creating homes that feel like the people who belong there, because we never want somebody to walk into a completed project and feel as though their personality has been replaced with ours.
There will naturally be a NEST way of thinking behind the work; we care deeply about proportion, movement, materiality, function, light and how spaces make people feel, but the finished home should never become a showroom for the designer.
Instead, our role is to listen for the things a client may not yet know how to articulate.
It is to recognise the thread running through a collection of images that, at first glance, may seem completely unrelated. It is knowing when to introduce restraint so that a stronger decision has room to breathe, and knowing when a client is hovering around the choice they really want but needs a little confidence to step towards it.
That process relies heavily on trust.
Georgia trusted us to take the ideas she was bringing to the table, push them where they needed pushing and pull everything together into something that felt cohesive, while we trusted the instinct she already had for her own home.
That relationship between designer and client is often where the most interesting interiors begin to emerge.
We loved working with Tonga to redecorate our new home. From the beginning, she really listened to us, understood our vision, and shared our excitement for what we wanted to achieve. She helped us find practical solutions that made the most of our budget, while incorporating our ideas and preferences. She brought creative suggestions that we loved and ultimately chose to include.
Tonga also guided us on lots of practical aspects, like curtain styles and installation and lighting installation – she knows a lot about the practical side and how to work with tradespeople for a great result. We thoroughly enjoyed the process and would highly recommend NEST to anyone looking for professional advice on design / renovation / redecorating.
Georgia
You can read this review and others on our Google Profile.
What we love about the Derbyshire Whare
What we love most about the Derbyshire Whare is not one particular finish, colour or room.
It is the fact that the home has been allowed to have a point of view.
There is personality in the decisions, but there is also consideration behind them. There are moments that feel expressive alongside quieter spaces that allow the eye to rest, and rather than trying to make the home conform to a particular interior style, the design evolved around the people who were actually going to wake up there every morning, gather there at the end of the day and experience these spaces long after the photographs had been taken.
That, for us, is always the bigger measure of a successful home.
Not whether everybody else would make exactly the same choices, but whether those choices make sense for the people they were made for.
Because the homes we remember are rarely the ones that tried hardest to offend nobody.
They are the ones where, somewhere along the way, the people who lived there felt confident enough to leave a little of themselves behind.
Design that holds people, not just things.
