Charmed: inside the home of Links of London founder Annoushka Ducas - a Pimlico cottage remodelled into a Georgian jewel

Ducas called on a top interior designer friend to reconfigure her dream London home.
Phillippa Stockley13 March 2020

Party-loving home seekers wouldn’t usually be drawn to a cottage just one room deep, built 200 years ago in central London for a Thames lighterman.

Jewellery designer Annoushka Ducas wasn’t looking for it, either. But fate, which stirs her romantic half-Russian, half-English soul, took charge after she and her husband, John Ayton, had searched three years for their dream home.

“In 2007, I saw this house in Pimlico and immediately fell in love with it, but it was ridiculously expensive,” says Ducas. “So I didn’t show John.”

Ducas, 51, and Ayton, 54, founded Links of London and later the Annoushka jewellery business, the latter with stores in London, Hong Kong and concessions in Harrods, Harvey Nicks, Liberty London and Selfridges.

Take a tour of Annoushka Ducas' Pimlico home

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Raised in Kent by her Russian mother, who trained show jumpers, Ducas rode from age three. Her late father, publishing agent Bob Ducas, was based in New York. After school she went to Paris to perfect her French, then worked for her godfather, Annabel’s nightclub founder Mark Birley.

Next, she set up a sandwich business in Australia, then became an estate agent, running Hamptons Hong Kong. She married Ayton, then a corporate lawyer, and they returned to London, starting Links in 1990. Ducas designed its trademark cufflinks and jewellery. In 2006 they sold for £50 million and Ducas began her current eponymous venture in 2009.

During the Nineties the couple lived in Notting Hill with the eldest two of their four children — Marina, now 24, and Ollie, 22. With entrepreneurial spirit, Marina recently launched London Velvet, a handcrafted designer accessories business.

The family house was a tall terrace, and Ducas got fed up with running up and down stairs all day. The couple moved to Suffolk, to a house they still own, but kept an office in town. Daughter Chloe, now 19, and son Oscar, 16, came along.

Then in 2007, at the top of the market, they began hunting for a new London home: something lateral and great for entertaining, anywhere in the city — but the right thing never materialised.

Space makers: bright, fun colourways have entertaining in mind
Charles Hosea

Flipping through a magazine in 2010, Ducas spotted the little Georgian cottage she had seen three years before, now for rent. It looked just the same. “I rang and asked if it was still for sale. It was. It was fate. We bought it for 30 per cent less than its original price, fully furnished, and moved in next day. John said, ‘Why didn’t you show me this three years ago?’”

Before Ducas signed the deal, she called a childhood friend, top interior designer Tino Zervudachi. The house had been owned by a theatre producer who’d added a triangular extension. It created a bright, white kitchen and dining area leading out through huge glass sliding doors to an elegant formal garden. The same limestone floor in both kitchen and a seating area outside made a fantastic entertaining space, which Ducas knew would take a marquee, for a party.

But the middle, main room was a real problem. An odd shape, entered directly from the front door, it was set up as a screening room. A deep battery of equipment stole two feet from the back wall. A sofa loomed opposite. Distracting open-sided stairs ran up one side, and the final insult was a big square utility room that hacked out the entire corner. What space there was left was neither comfortable, practical, nor cosy.

“I didn’t want it if I couldn’t change that, so I rang Tino. He said, ‘Just buy it, you’ve got to have it’. He is the most practical person, and if he says do something, I do it. So, we bought it.”

Love at first sight: Ducas first fell in love with her house in 2007
Charles Hosea

Zervudachi set to work. He left the kitchen extension alone, since it was in perfect condition and high spec, but he reconfigured the living area, a bedroom oddly placed beside it, and the upstairs.

He ripped out the ridiculous laundry room and cleverly tucked a mini one under the stairs, closing it off with an invisible “jib” door. All the film gubbins was next to go, making the room even bigger, and he mirrored the back wall, appearing to double the space. “There are mirrors everywhere,” Ducas laughs.

The side bedroom became a study, with a huge door rather than its tiny original Georgian one. This flamboyant touch adds to the illusion of space. Handmade wallpapers tie everything together. And since there’s no hall, Zervudachi put a mirrored folded screen by the front door, adding a sense of privacy.

Relax: behind a wall containing a fireplace is a sitting room/study
Charles Hosea

His other great ideas included reconfiguring a bedroom and bathroom to create a master bedroom with a dressing room and bathroom off it — no mean feat in a house of only 1,200sq ft before the small extension.

Hung with lots of art — Ayton chairs the Cass Sculpture Foundation and Ducas promotes artists in her shops — and scattered with rich velvet cushions on the new bespoke sofa, the cottage is inviting, warm and appears twice its true size. This home really is a jewel.