City Elegance
Interior Design| London
When we are invited back for our third project with the same family , we can collaborate and enjoy a new chapter in a family’s design journey with fun and laughter because trust has been established. This generous mansion bloc apartment offers luxurious lateral living space and we helped to optimize the flow with small interventions to doors and walls. The family relocated locally during the eight month full scale renovation which included to rewire, replumb, fit new radiators, flooring, lighting and fitted joinery.
Defining the Brief
It was time to offer the children separate bedrooms and we remodeled a spare bedroom into a cozy teenage sanctuary. The family is very active and plenty of sporting equipment had accumulated and was in need of an organization system. The master bedroom felt tired and overflowed with books and we created suitable storage. The playroom graduated to become a mature family room. The dining and reception rooms were revived to new elegance with small effective improvements.
A Canopy of Books
Hallways of Victorian large mansion bloc apartments are very generous and offer a great opportunity to enhance the luxury of the property. By adding a canopy of slim bookcases between and above doorways all along you can turn them into valuable living space.
Bespoke Joinery
Few projects have given us as much scope to demonstrate our skills with truly bespoke joinery design as this clients’ home. Each member of the family worked with us describing their individual requirements, what doesn’t work and what they would like to achieve with the new furniture; it was an exemplary case study of how to best employ the value added that customized interior design can bring to improve your daily quality of life. Every drawer and shelf was measured individually in centimeters to store the desired items whether lipsticks, sewing kits, craft materials, hairdryers, shoes, games, scooters, riding helmets and much more.
Hallway Rescue
Who doesn’t suffer fits of frustration with cluttered hallways? When you have to store 4 scooters and bike helmets, riding helmets, whips, mud boots, school bags, sports kits, other shoes and coats and jackets for all the seasons and more for a family for four , even a decent hallway can start to look like a jumble. We turned a door way into a large hallway wardrobe. By giving up this extra route we created an extra deep storage which means the hallway is back to order.
INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE
The Art of Small Space Luxury
Originally we had hope to remove the fireplace and take out the entire chimney stack in the corner of this bedroom but when the structural engineer report dashed that dream we had to sharpen the pencils again and work even harder to make this teenagers’ dream room work to her specifications. We swapped everything around and still managed to tick off her wish list: Sleepover bed cum sofa which can be shut off with curtains , plenty of shelving for books, desk with vanity station, space to grow her miniature plants, notice boards for her artwork inspirations and plenty of sockets at all heights around the room to move around little lights and other gadgets. When you take time to detail every centimeter of space in a room and make every piece of furniture bespoke to fit the space you can be amazed how much can be achieved.
Colour Consultation
We tweaked everything but nothing looks new
The best compliment I can imagine for this project is that when the family moved back everything had been touched and yet everything felt like it was always there and meant to be this way. I think that’s a real secret in interior decoration when you can spend eight months re-working a home but then it’s just so perfectly comfortable you don’t have to get used into it. Working with an extensive existing collection of artworks and finding the balance between keeping some furniture and replace others requires finetuning and patience. We worked with the wonderful shaded colour systems from Paint and Paper Library for the main walls but then used many other paint brands in order to find the perfect shade of blue, yellow of aqua, often resorting to archive collections. Lighting plays an important role and we refrained from using downlights and only worked with wall lights, table lamps, LED and added bookcase lights to many of the fixed installations. Another particular twist in this project was the specification of all radiators in bespoke colours, either matching the wall paint of contrasting with it to create a pop of colour.
Monkey Bars
Working through wish lists is wonderfully rewarding and we were able to fit in a gym climbing wall rack for the younger child which allows her to practice fitness skills. Besides this little treat she has a sleepover bed with a curtain, a reading nook, plenty of shelving and her own study desk and she picked the color scheme of her room including the wallpaper and fabrics and paints from our studio library.
INTERIOR STYLING
What is your favorite bird?
The family room was stripped back to the bricks and this allowed us full freedom to optimize each component. This multipurpose room houses the children’s wardrobes as well as a sleepover sofa. The bookcases which line around all three walls were designed to store exercise mats, a sewing table and a vast collection of games and books. The luxurious touch on the masterpiece of joinery is the hand drawn chinoiserie paintwork which features ten native birds which the family picked out and we placed each singing friend carefully around the room. The patchwork sofa is made with ten different fabrics because each of the Pierre Frey designs was too gorgeous to be discarded so we created our most unusual sofa ever by using all the designs in one collection.
