You could say that interior designer Katharine Pooley fell into her career by accident. In 2003, she took on the task of improving the interior of her family’s holiday home in Scotland as a personal project. The following year, she repeated the task when she bought and redecorated two upmarket holiday lets: one in Thailand and the other in Colorado, in America.
It was only when friends, family and holiday guests kept pestering her about where she had found the eclectic designer accessories and furniture she had used that Pooley decided to open an interior design shop in Chelsea, west London, in October 2004, and to set up a business carrying out refurbishment projects for wealthy clients. She won two design awards the following year, establishing her reputation.
The success of her business is now leading Pooley, 39, a former human resources manager, in yet another new direction. Her latest, most ambitious, project is to start buying large houses in need of refurbishment, spend hundreds of thousands of pounds redesigning their interiors and then — she hopes — sell them on for a substantial profit.
To release the funds to get started, she has reluctantly decided to sell the property she started with four years ago — Forter Castle in Perthshire, Scotland. Originally entirely owned by her father, Robert, and now jointly owned by the pair of them, the restored five-bedroom castle was a family gathering point for more than a decade before Pooley turned it into a luxury holiday let. She will be sad to see it go.
“I’ve had some lovely times there,” she says. “It’s been in the family a long time. We used to all get together in the summer, my parents and my five siblings with their families, and hike in the Scottish hills. I have some good memories and it’s been very popular among holidaymakers, but I’m just too busy now to make enough personal use of it.”
Running her shop and dealing with private design commissions leaves Pooley with little time to spend in Scotland. Having bought a half-share of Forter Castle four years ago from her father, who wanted help managing the lettings, she has now asked Knight Frank to market it to private clients with a guide price of £1.5m.
“These days my family are more likely to want to get together in the sun, at my beach villa in Thailand, or to head for the slopes at my ski lodge in Colorado,” she says. “It’s no good hanging on to a house for purely emotional reasons. We have been advertising it for let through the shop, but dealing with the queries can be time-consuming.”
Robert Pooley bought the castle as a dilapidated ruin in 1988 for just £15,000. Built by the Ogilvy family in 1560, it was destroyed 80 years later by the Duke of Argyll, who burnt it down as part of a long-lived feud. For the next 350 years, it lay in ruins, with oak trees growing in the middle.
Robert cleared 34 trees and three tons of rubble from the site before commissioning an architect to come up with a £1m restoration plan. He convinced Historic Scotland to pay £200,000 towards the cost. The work took nearly two years, with rebuilding following the original design as closely as possible, using clues in the brickwork and a good understanding of Scottish castle architecture.
Having managed the castle until 2003, Robert then invited his daughter to buy the half-share. She will not say how much it cost her, but it is believed to have been about £400,000. At the time, Pooley and her husband, Rob, an investment banker, were returning to Britain from Hong Kong, where she had spent 14 years working in human resources for Barclays and Morgan Stanley.
“Inside, it was incredibly basic,” she says. “My father had done a good job of rebuilding it, but hadn’t done much to the interior, which was all pine. It needed to be made special, and I spent a year measuring, planning and ordering items. When everything was ready, we blitzed it in a week to put everything in place before the next tenants arrived.”
She stained all the floors, replaced all the lamps and curtains, hung paintings and brought in expensive designer beds and furniture. “My one mistake was to rely on visualising the furniture in place and forgetting to measure doors, windows or stairwells. The Ralph Lauren bed had to be cut in half to get it in and then bolted back together, which destroyed its value.”
In the same year, Pooley and her husband also bought a house in London’s Belgravia, which they transformed, knocking through walls, extending the kitchen and completely rewiring and redecorating it to make a spacious five-bedroom house. The house, in which she now lives, was filled with artefacts she has picked up all over the world during her travels.
Pooley shops in Paris, Bangkok and Myanmar to create a fusion of east meets west, a formula that she has repeated in varying degrees in all her properties. In Forter Castle, this eclecticism is reflected in a mix of Spanish chairs, Chinese mahogany cabinets, French tapestries and tartan rugs.
“But my style has been changing and evolving,” she says. “There is a more Scottish influence in Forter Castle and the accent is on Asian furnishings in my beach villa in Phuket, but as I get older, I am going for cleaner lines. I rent a cottage near Bicester in Oxfordshire, and I have kept that neutral, with white walls and no clutter or paintings.”
Her Chelsea shop is a one-stop emporium for luxury items such as stingray-skin desks, shell caviar dishes and ancient Japanese kimono cushions. Liz Hurley has been known to shop there, and Pooley has attracted many wealthy clients, especially after winning a British Interior Design Association design, quality and innovation award in 2005.
Since opening the shop, Pooley has also launched a wedding-list service, which offers all her fine furnishings. She also markets the properties she owns as honeymoon destinations and offers a bespoke service to redesign the interior of the happy couple’s own home while they are away, installing wedding gifts by hand.
Pooley’s latest venture is based on the idea that her clients would be the ideal targets for buying fully refurbished homes from her, ones where all the hard work of selecting furniture, fittings and colours has already been done in a style they are likely to appreciate.
“I did think about doing this in London,” she says, “but I don’t feel the central London market has enough stock at the right price. For the right sort of place, I would need about £3m, but I would rather start smaller and grow from there. I want to buy a house in the £1m price range and spend at least £300,000 improving it, depending on whether it needs walls knocked out.”
She has considered investing in Devon or along the south coast, but has come to the conclusion that her emerging “clean lines” style will not suit those areas, where the prevailing decor tends to be more relaxed. And there is arguably less headroom in markets a long way from London to make the sort of profit she is hoping for.
When she began renting in Bicester last year, she was trying to find a location within a 90-minute commute of London, which would offer scope for the launch of her new business. She now believes that Cobham in Surrey could be the ideal place to start.
“I know a lot of American women in Cobham whose husbands work in the City, and they are prepared to spend a lot of money for nice houses,” she says. “Property there seems reasonably priced and it’s a growing area. I would aim to buy for £1m and sell for £1.5m-£2m.
“I’ve heard it said that you can have four careers in your life and I’ve already had three — I started in advertising, moved into human resources and now interior design. Over the past two years my shop has always come first, and if you had asked me last year whether I would be thinking about buying property now, I would have said no. But the idea has always been there — it’s just been waiting for the right time.”
Forter Castle is being sold through Knight Frank, 0131 222 9600, www.knightfrank.co.uk
