The nature of the place: A Wimbledon home drawn from its surroundings

At mention of Wimbledon, most minds turn to strawberries and cream and a fortnight of unforgettable tennis in early summer. But the neighbourhood’s more enduring pleasure is quieter and evergreen – the sprawl of the common, the charm of the village, the gardens that bring life to every road. It was this Wimbledon, the one that lasts all year, that designer Joel Azevedo set out to capture at Cedar Park Gardens . And he did it quite literally: from the outside in.

That instinct – to let a place speak first – defined the project from the start. When Joel first walked inside, the handsome Georgian coach house had been redressed with an interior that didn’t quite fit. “It had this lovely Georgian exterior, but had been completely modernised inside,” he recalls. “The period features had all been removed over time. It just felt out of touch with what it should have been.” The owners agreed, briefing elegant interiors in keeping with the heritage they hoped to recover. Joel began by putting back what time had stripped out, but restoration, for him, was only ever the groundwork.

The risk with a period home, Joel is quick to point out, is tipping into pastiche. “It’s easy to end up too traditional and stuffy, to the point you feel transported to the past,” he says. “Or too modern, where it feels at odds with the framework.” But harmony can be found, as long as the bones are intact. His way through is not to bend the house to a style, nor a style to the house, but to work in the space between. “You can bring a modern touch to traditional features in so many ways – with colour, texture, the finer details,” he adds. “You can honour a home’s roots without living in the past .”

There’s a particular sensibility behind that lightness of touch, one Joel traces to his native Brazil, where he worked for a decade before coming to London. “In traditional English design, things can sometimes feel heavy, whether there’s too much going on or design that’s overwhelming,” he says. “In Brazil, because it’s hot and we’re so often outside, we like to keep a sense of freshness.” In practice, that means knowing when to let a room breathe: swapping a dense pattern for texture, introducing a playful note or an unexpected material so that your gaze has somewhere to settle. It’s a concept he carries through the kitchen – cream cabinetry and brass, light pouring in from the garden, and then a deep blue island.

Follow the house through and the outdoors keeps reappearing. The clearest illustration came early, in the brief he gave Eliza Downes, the artist commissioned to paint the home’s murals and screens. Forgoing Pinterest boards and colour charts, he sent her photographs. “I wanted it to be a true capture of the surroundings – the greenery and the setting,” he explains. “She incorporated all of that into the artwork.” What came back was the garden’s own palette, carried indoors by hand.

Grasscloth on the walls, leaf motifs, embroidered fabrics, a palette drawn down from the treetops. “Now there’s this feeling of being continually embraced by it,” Joel muses. Nowhere is that clearer than in the glazed dining extension. With glass on two sides and a lantern rooflight overhead, the room dissolves the line between inside and garden almost entirely. “With the glass and the skylight, you almost feel as though you’re outside,” he notes – the whole space designed to make the most of it. Moving the kitchen to face south followed the same logic, chasing the light and giving the home a generous, sociable place to gather.

Much of Joel’s thinking went into how rooms would actually be lived in. In the drawing room, he drew two moods from a single space: comfortable sofas facing the television at one end, armchairs gathered around the fireplace at the other – relaxed and formal sitting side by side. “So much thought went into the liveability of the social areas,” he says. “I think we struck a really lovely balance.”

It’s also where the house pulls decisively away from the anonymity of a hotel. Ask Joel for the detail he’s proudest of, and he doesn’t reach for anything you’d notice first. It’s underfoot: the stair runner. “We tracked down a 19th-century loom that’s still producing these runners today. It’s the same loom used for the Houses of Parliament and the royal palaces. Just setting it up takes two days.” The design was drawn bespoke for the house, then ordered and fitted – “one of the most interesting things we added,” in his words.

It would be easy to assume this kind of heritage work is where Joel has always lived. The truth is nearly the opposite. “If you’d asked me seven years ago whether I’d be doing traditional interior design, I’d have said absolutely not,” he laughs. He arrived in London a committed minimalist – Brazil, he points out, is mostly new-build. He fell, unexpectedly, for precisely what he’d never had. “I fell in love with the period homes here. The house itself becomes the starting point; you have to consider what it needs first.”

The long English winter reshaped his thinking, too. “You spend so much time indoors here,” he reflects. “There’s a real need to feel embraced by the rooms.” Bringing the outside in, then, is more than an aesthetic – a consolation for the months the garden is too cold to sit in. Which is, in the end, what a stay at Cedar Park Gardens offers: Wimbledon’s green calm, indoors and available no matter the season .

Cedar Park Gardens is available for vacation rental.