The brief: dissolve the boundary
When interior designer Clara Ashworth and her husband, the landscape architect Tom Ashworth, bought a narrow Georgian townhouse in Bloomsbury in 2022, they gave themselves a single constraint: every room must have a view of something growing. The result is a house where the garden does not begin at the back door — it threads through the entire ground floor like a vein of green.
‘We wanted the garden to be the house’s organising principle,’ Clara says. ‘Not something you visit, but something you move through.’
The green corridor
The Ashworths removed the wall between the kitchen and the rear garden and replaced it with floor-to-ceiling steel-framed glass. The garden — really a 12-metre-long courtyard designed by Tom — is visible from the front door. A path of reclaimed York stone runs the length of the house, flanked by planting beds that Tom describes as ‘a river of green’ — ferns, hostas, Solomon’s seal, and three multi-stemmed amelanchiers that cast dappled shade across the kitchen floor.
Inside, Clara used a palette of chalky plaster walls, raw oak floors, and linen upholstery in shades of moss, stone, and charcoal. ‘The interior needed to recede,’ she says. ‘The garden is the main event. The house is just the frame.’
The conservatory room
The coup de grâce is a glass-roofed room at the rear — technically a conservatory but furnished like a sitting room, with a deep sofa, a wall of books, and a single large terracotta pot containing a Ficus benjamina that Tom has trained into an umbrella canopy. ‘It is the most-used room in the house,’ Clara says. ‘We eat breakfast there in winter, read there in summer, and fall asleep there on Sunday afternoons. It never feels like a greenhouse. It feels like a room that happens to have a tree in it.’
