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Drive up through the sweeping entrance of this estate in Surrey Hills, England, and the ghosts make themselves known. The Cedar of Lebanon trees are the first sign—enormous, ancestral, and entirely out of place in a residential garden. Victorians collected exotic specimen trees the way others collected art—planting saplings brought back from the Middle East and North Africa, then leaving them to future generations to reckon with. The families who planted them are long gone, but their trees stayed. So, it turns out, did their spirit.
That spirit—the Victorian instinct to collect, to layer, to bring the world home and arrange it beautifully—is very much still alive, a fact not lost on London-based interior designer Linda Boronkay, founder of Boronkay Studio, who led the project with her senior designer Julian Ballester. The original 16th-century building was destroyed by fire, though what was rebuilt followed its exact architectural features. The home’s old fives court—an antiquated English ball sport with just two active venues left in the country—survived the blaze, as did the original aviary. Charles Darwin had researched and written his final book here. “As soon as we started to dig into the history,” Boronkay says, “it just got more and more exciting.”
Martin Morrell
Behind the main sofa in the “party room” sits a baby grand piano and a DJ console with record storage built into the cabinetry. The walls and trim are drenched in high-gloss paint.
The clients brought their own layered story. One half of the couple was from Scotland and the other had spent years between South Africa and Hong Kong. Each one had raised children from previous relationships, and they came to the project as a newly blended family with five adult children between them. Their desire was both tender and practical: to make a home so good that their children, increasingly inclined to spend weekends at country house hotels, would choose it instead. “They realized they were at the age where the kids start going away for weekends with their friends,” Boronkay says. “So they thought: ‘Why don’t we make our house better than any hotel they’d want to go to?'”
That brief came with a catch. Everything—including two new wing extensions that doubled the footprint of both the kitchen and the party room—had to be finished in about a year, in time for Christmas. “We’re not fainthearted,” Ballester says, “but it was quite a hard deadline.”
Martin Morrell
The boot room is drenched in a moody paint that has the effect of releasing you into the brightness of the adjoining kitchen.
The grounds set the scale. A forest runs along the back of the property; stone urns and ponds punctuate the lawns, and those imposing Cedar of Lebanon trees cast shadows across everything. The family had also begun installing shepherd’s huts—small, self-contained retreats traditionally used by farmhands, now fitted out as guest accommodation for when the house itself wasn’t enough.
Inside, the house moves between two energies—the ceremonial and the lived in—and Boronkay navigates the distance between them. The entry hall establishes the tone with walls upholstered in a warm grass-cloth wallpaper, with panels of antique mirror running along the upper register, the whole room honeyed and quietly grand. A pair of vintage bamboo chairs sit upholstered in bright yellow—a nod to the owner’s years living in Asia, one of several personal histories folded into the fabric of the house. Overhead, a Murano glass chandelier found on a three-day antiquing trip to Italy—taken with the clients—dominates the space. “It’s something that really shouldn’t belong there,” Boronkay says, “but it works so well.” A pattern, it turns out, that repeats throughout the property.
Martin Morrell
The kitchen is where the family spends the majority of their time, so it is sized accordingly and contains a communal table, a reading nook, a fireplace lounge, and French doors that open onto the pool.
From there, every room builds on the last. The boot room, which is dark, richly colored, and marble-tiled, pulls you in before releasing you into the brightness of the kitchen, a strategy Boronkay describes as deliberate—the house reveals itself in stages, one room pulling you toward the next. The kitchen occupies an entire wing, twice its original size, with a dairy-height communal table, a reading nook, a fireplace lounge, and French doors that open onto the pool. It is where, Boronkay says, the family spends the majority of their time.
The west wing—what the family calls the party room—is drenched in a high-gloss paint on every surface, from floor to ceiling joinery, a counterintuitive choice that the designers pushed for deliberately. High gloss doesn’t hide a room’s flaws, it magnifies them, every small nick and variation catching the light. In a house rebuilt from the bones of a 16th-century original, those imperfections read as patina, evidence of a life already lived here. Antique mirrors on the ceiling amplify the effect, glistening as the western sun drops through full-height doors that open straight onto the garden.
Martin Morell
The murano glass chandelier in the entry hall was found on a shopping trip to Venice that Boronkay took with her clients.
Behind the main sofa sits a baby grand piano and a DJ console with record storage built into the cabinetry. Across the room, a bespoke marble mosaic bar with speakeasy energy. Hidden in the joinery, a cooled wine room entered through what appears to be a wall. “You enter this room,” Boronkay says, “and you know you’re going to have a good time.”
From there, the house returns to formality—briefly. The drawing room offers linen walls and garden views, a place to gather after dinner before the evening loosens. Beyond an archway, the dining room is painted in high-gloss aubergine from floor to cornice, a contemporary Tibetan rug disrupting the Victorian gravity.
The primary bedroom, by design, is a relief from all of it. A bespoke brass four-poster—on the mood board since day one, among the last pieces to arrive—anchors a room stripped of the house’s usual chromatic intensity. The bathroom takes its cues from legendary Italian architect and designer Renzo Mongiardino: Persian rugs, curtains framing a freestanding bath, and mirrors concealing recessed storage. The marble surround is trimmed not in a standard bullnose profile but in a ceramic teapot-glaze tile, the room’s only obvious gesture toward its English address.
Martin Morrell
The primary bedroom with a bespoke brass four-poster bed.
The children’s rooms on the upper floors make clear what the whole project understands about hospitality: a house meant to keep people coming home can’t feel like a hotel, even a beautiful one. Each of the five bedrooms was designed around a specific person: one daughter’s lime-washed and layered with bobbin cornice, another’s consumed by full-scale botanical wallpaper made adult with moody curtaining and a tiger-print chair. At the very top of the house, a former windowless gym became a light-filled bedroom. Its bathroom is modeled on a Victorian bathhouse—encaustic tile, steam-room atmosphere, a room that feels borrowed from a century that knew how to take a bath. The Victorians, after all, never built anything they didn’t also make beautiful.
“As much as it’s opulent in areas,” Boronkay says, “it’s something tailored to their lifestyle. It’s not for show. It’s a home.” That Christmas, the family gathered. One daughter played the piano in the party room while the others sang. Before dinner, they dressed, came downstairs, and had cocktails in the west wing before moving through to the dining room. The shepherd’s huts in the ground—fitted out with leftover fabric from the kitchen curtains, a detail the family took on themselves—were full. Videos and photos arrived in the designers’ inbox the next morning. “Each and every room has its function,” Boronkay says. “There are no areas that are forgotten or unused.”
Step Inside This English Estate
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It’s the most Victorian outcome imaginable: a house so layered, so considered, and so full of things worth staying for that no one wants to leave. Boronkay supposes the spirits approve.
Julia Cancilla is the engagement editor at ELLE Decor, where she oversees the brand’s social media and writes about the intersection of design, pop culture, and emerging trends. She also authors the monthly ELLE Decoroscope column. Her work has appeared in Inked magazine, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, and more.