Claire Simpson Studio · Interior Design & Design-Led Hospitality

Rooms built outward from a single, well-chosen thing.

For thirty years I've designed interiors and the places people travel to stay in. I begin each room with one sympathetic hero, often an antique, and let the scheme collect itself around it.

Practice

Private residences, heritage restoration & design-led hospitality. Rutland & Europe.

Training

KLC School of Design, London. Three decades of work.

Ethos

I design rooms to feel settled, to linger, to rest.

Selected Work Homes · Hospitality · Stays

Lapwing House

Heritage renovation · Rutland · 1744

A Grade II listed house dating to 1744. Ironstone walls, reclaimed oak, and a carpenter's bench put to work as a kitchen prep table. I kept what the building already was, and built the rooms around it rather than over it.

The house feels like itself again.

Lapwing House dining room — two-plank sycamore table from a country-house scullery, ironstone wall, antique chairs

Lapwing House — Hungarian chest of drawers in original ochre and green paint, with a weathered vessel lamp

The anchors: a two-plank sycamore table from a country-house scullery, and a Hungarian chest in its original ochre and green paint. Each room built outward from one kept thing. Around them, antique chairs, stone bowls and collected French dairy pots.

Detail studies

Lapwing House — scrubbed antique table with spring bulbs

Lapwing House — antique green-glazed bowls and an olive jar on the marble, over the reeded oak

Lapwing House — sunlit doorway to the pantry

The anchor: the table, an old door from the Pyrenees, its great planks and iron strapping kept intact. The room was built outward from it, alongside antique wooden serving spoons, a Hungarian dough bowl and a French chopping board.

Detail studies

Masseria — copper and tin bath beneath the vaulted stone ceiling, four-poster beyond

Masseria

Luxury stay · Puglia, Italy · 2007–2009

A masseria on five acres of ancient olive grove in Puglia, built with local craftsmen and materials drawn from within twenty miles: stone, lime and timber, all native to the region.

Masserias were the great agricultural estates of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puglia, fortified farmhouses raised in thick limestone, with watchtowers and inner courtyards to keep workers and harvest safe from coastal raids.

Though newly built, it followed the old ways throughout: lime-plastered walls, star-vaulted ceilings in the indigenous stone, floors of locally quarried stone, and a fireplace made to replicate an original.

Featured on the cover of Homes & Gardens.

No. 23

Design-led hospitality · Uppingham · 2022

A kitchen, bar and terrace behind the handsome façade of a three-hundred-year-old, Grade II listed Georgian building: soft green panelling, studded leather, botanical pictures and an olive tree set in an arched window. A dining room composed to feel collected, not fitted out.

The kind of place people come back to.

No. 23 dining room — green panelling, studded leather chairs, arched window with olive tree

No. 23 — period stone facade, Kitchen Bar Terrace

The anchor: the Georgian bones, styled with a collector's eye: arched windows, an old mirror, botanical prints, and a wall of antique confit pots and oil pourers.

Detail studies

No. 23 — antiqued mirror and cone pendant over the panelled bar

No. 23 — the garden room through open doors, botanical prints and rattan lights

No. 23 — green leather bar stools with brass studs and swivel bases

The Shambles — wood-burner in a beamed inglenook with encaustic tiles

The Shambles — Bulwick ironstone cottage, decorative iron porch and Collyweston slate roof

The anchor: a prep table kept in its deep, original oxblood paint. Around it, the building brought back: the inglenook uncovered, the original shutters restored, artwork carefully sourced, antiques blended in.

Detail studies

The Shambles — twin bedroom with upholstered headboards under the eaves

The Shambles

Design-led holiday cottage · Bulwick

A Grade II listed, mid-eighteenth-century two-bedroom cottage of Bulwick ironstone under a Collyweston slate roof, designed room by room: hand-blocked prints, a wood-burner set into a beamed inglenook, and layers of pattern that settle rather than shout.

It feels like a home, not a let.

The Nevill Arms

Country inn · Medbourne · The Three Goats Group

A country inn given its full interior scheme for The Three Goats Group, with inky-toned walls, a stone inglenook and wood-burner, and antiques layered against the stone with a collector's eye: leather club armchairs, Yorkshire milking stools, an antique rug and an original French wine corker. On the walls, framed photographs of the bottle-kicking, the generations-old contest the pub sits at the heart of.

The whole palette was drawn from a single painting, La Fenêtre by the French artist Pierre-Yves Russo, which hangs in the room.

Named in The Daily Telegraph's Best 250 Hotels in the UK.

The Nevill Arms — the honey-ironstone facade in sun, mullioned windows, clipped bay trees and an arched door, benches on the forecourt

The Nevill Arms — stag and framed bottle-kicking photographs above the lit inglenook, oak settle

The anchor: a seventeenth-century Welsh oak coffer. Around it, a stag's head centre stage above the inglenook and an old leather saddle on the log store.

Detail studies

The Nevill Arms — leather club armchairs, Yorkshire milking stools, an antique rug and a 17th-century Welsh coffer by the wood-burner, with framed antique maps

The Nevill Arms — the framed 1879 auction notice naming the inn, an antique saddle on the log store

The Nevill Arms — an original French wine corker and La Fenêtre by Pierre-Yves Russo, the painting that set the palette, above a buttoned leather banquette

The Studio

About

Thirty years of interiors, built one considered thing at a time.

I trained at the KLC School of Design in London, and have worked since on private houses, heritage restorations and design-led hospitality, from Rutland to Puglia.

My way of working is simple. I begin each room with one sympathetic thing, usually an antique, and let the scheme gather around it. I keep what a building already is, and design outward from there rather than over it.

The aim never changes: rooms that feel settled, that you want to linger in, that feel as though they were always this way.

Practice

What I do

Interior Design

Full schemes for private residences: concept, sourcing, and the coordination of makers and trades, room by room.

Heritage Restoration

Sympathetic work on listed and period buildings, keeping what is already there and letting the design follow the fabric.

Design-Led Hospitality

Inns, restaurants and places to stay, composed to feel collected rather than fitted out.

Stays & Escapes

Places to stay

Several of the studio's projects are places you can actually stay.

The inns, cottages and houses shown here were made to be lived in, not only looked at.

In partnership with BERTS

Alongside the interiors, I help people make more than a home: somewhere private of their own, land turned into income, or a stay added to an existing hospitality offering. This work reaches well beyond the residential.

BERTS are handcrafted heritage cabins designed by the architects at Box 9, already found at The Pig and Louma Reserve. I take your idea of a dreamy escape and turn it into reality, with thirty years of readying places for you and your guests. From the first idea to a guest-ready cabin, I hold your hand through every decision. Unique, exceptional craftsmanship and all-natural reclaimed interiors with soul: this is why BERTS is my chosen partnership.