meet nicola
I'm Nicola. I've spent the last twenty-four years designing spaces — hotels, workplaces, retail interiors, and homes — and the last few of those years focused entirely on the last of them, from Hertfordshire.
Most of my clients are families I meet through friends of friends, or through the people who look after their houses — architects, agents, contractors. Some come to me with a handful of rooms that need finishing. Others with a whole period home that needs reimagining. Nearly all of them arrive with the same feeling: they know what they don't like, but they can't quite put into words what they want.
That's where the work starts.
I trained at the Glasgow School of Art after studying Fine Art — a foundation that taught me to look properly at things. Composition. Colour. Craft. The bit that most people feel but can't articulate.
My first years were spent at architectural practice Greig & Stephenson, working on hospitality and F&B interiors across London and Europe. Hotels teach you how strangers arrive, unwind, gather and sleep. Restaurants teach you how a room shapes a mood in twenty minutes flat.
Workplace design came next, then retail. Both teach you about behaviour — how people move through a space, where they linger, what makes them relax and what makes them tense. Retail also teaches you the power of the smallest detail, the way a single texture or light fitting can shift the feeling of an entire room.
By the time I turned to family homes, I'd spent nearly two decades reading how people actually inhabit spaces. That muscle underpins everything I do now.
One project that shaped a lot of my later thinking was the refurbishment of a fifteen-bedroom guest house at the Hatfield Estate, working with Lady Salisbury. We were merging two buildings into one, integrating furniture and textiles drawn from the wider estate, and working alongside the architect and English Heritage on how to honour the fabric of the building without embalming it.
It taught me — or perhaps just confirmed — how to work with old houses. What to touch and what to leave alone. How to weave in the new so it feels like it always belonged. How to translate what a client wants into decisions the building itself agrees with.
Most of the period homes I now work on around Hertfordshire benefit quietly from that lesson.
THE MANDEVILLE APPROACH
PERSONAL SANCTUARY
Homes that feel like they restore you from the world outside, not perform for it. Calm, considered, quietly luxurious.
interpretation
Understanding how you want to live, often before you can put it into words.
It's the part of the work I care about most.
MATERIALITY & CRAFT
Beautiful materials, worked properly. Considered detailing. Craft you can feel with a hand on the joinery.
EASE OF LIVING
Homes that are intuitive to be in. Rooms that work without you thinking about them. The kind of quiet functionality that makes daily life easier without ever announcing itself.
Based in Hertfordshire
I work mostly across Harpenden, St Albans, Radlett and the villages around them. I know the local housing stock, the way planning tends to move in the conservation areas, the agents, and the way news of a good designer travels around here.
If you're thinking about a project, the best first step is a conversation. Free, unhurried, on site where possible. Whether you end up working with me or not, you'll leave with a clearer sense of what your home actually needs.