Bushey Hill Road

When staging a house like this 1901 beauty for a client selling through Inigo, Petra and I try and get a feeling for the energy of the place. We feel into the bones of the building. This house, a living embodiment of South London’s turn-of-the-century residential charm, where Victorian grace meets the burgeoning Edwardian spirit, needed an injection of nostalgia while keeping some of its more modern aspirations.

It was given an injection of life some years ago by designer Robinson Van Noort who added classic elements with a contemporary sensibility inside but had been very much lived in since then after the owners went away and let it out to students.

Once stripped of all its furniture this home near Peckham was needing a little care and attention so we fixed up the sagging curtains, cleaned up the garden as much as we could and added our touches throughout. With no furniture it needed a vanful.

We added a solid wood clocking in station with one of the original clocking in slips still in it to the hall. We put life back in the dining room with its tangerine curtains which the photographer cunningly captured bleeding into the gloss table top surrounded by stunning apple green chairs. We added a framed embroidered floral arrangement to the fireplace and old piece of coral and put a bar trolley in the corner with a majolica fruit bowl and green carafes. A Dansk green jug stands in the fireplace emerging from the shadow while a green midcentury vase sets off a variegated purple plant sitting on a wooden cake stand reflected in the gloss of the table top.

Green glass vases over the fireplace balance out the bowl in the embroidery and bring your eye to the stunning green German midcentury chairs around the dining table.

Equally eccentric, the sitting room suggests family treasures and pieces picked up in local Peckham and Camberwell. We love this toucan we paid a pretty penny for not so long ago at Ardingly.

The comfy Danish leather sofa and Berber rug adds softness to the boxy art deco style fireplace, with plants adding texture to the large expanse of tea stained wallpaper. The art over the fireplace looks like a piece that may have been painted in the next door art room. A candle had clearly burned the wallpaper in the past so we added one again to add to the story of the room.

The print below worked beautifully to highlight the pieces of coloured plastic that had been added to the windows in the studio above and looked like its had found its forever home with the sage green backdrop and fireplace we decorated with a few things we picked up over the years at our Midcentury Modern fair in Dulwich..

We did our best with a room that was highly patterned by bringing in a few whicker pieces and by not trying to over dress it.

We loved the terracotta and put Chinese baskets above the 2 wardrobes hung a rug beater from a handle and brought in a floating bed we made up and set off with a bent 50s plywood chair from Eastern Europe.