Design Decoded

Looking around someone else's beautiful home is not only good for the soul but can help us understand how to design our own. This week, we're soaking up summer colours in north London.

Browsing magazines for inspiration is all very well but there’s no substitute for taking a virtual stroll through a real home. One that has been simply tidied for photographers rather than styled, one where you can see how the owners might have dealt with an awkward corner, a sloping ceiling or a door in the wrong place.

So I like to focus on homes that are for sale in this regular feature helping you to understand what works and apply new ideas to your own places and spaces. That way you get to see a floorplan, and understand the storage and lighting, rather than seeing only the best features of a property. And I speak as one who has regularly featured in magazines and hurled unsightly piles of unopened post into the dishwasher while frantically removing all signs of real life – like vacuum cleaners and shoes – from the hall.

In fact I wrote a piece about behind the scenes of an interior shoot which has now passed into the archive (accessible to paid subscribers) along with 100 other posts on design know-how, inspiration and ideas. To read all that and receive my weekly posts, you can subscribe here.

This week we are visiting a house in Enfield, north London, which is on the market with Inigo. The 16th-century timber-framed hall house was extended in the 17th and 18th centuries and, in the 19th century, and belonged to the English writer siblings Charles and Mary Lamb. Isn’t it pretty?

As I mentioned above, Tthe other joy of a property for sale is that they tend to come with a floorplan. Now I will say I don’t know if UK estate agents are particularly good at this, but when we were househunting in Italy, floorplans were few and far between and often, when there was one, it was a vague outline that looked like it had been drawn on the back of an envelope with a biro – and without any accurate measurements, so it would be less than useless. For me, the floorplan is the most important thing after the location. Decor can always be changed so that should never be your primary concern when you look for a new home. But a detailed floorplan gives you a quick understanding of how the rooms connect, allowing you to see where you might want to remove a wall or alter a doorway. It will show you how thick a wall is, so you know how much it might cost to change it and, crucially, it allows you to plan whole spaces in the long months between making your offer and collecting the keys, thus saving time. It might even allow you to decide where the bed will go and how much storage you can fit in.

Having renovated two houses in two years, and with people asking me daily how I did it so fast I will say that, aside from great builders, a lot of it was down to advance planning. To poring over floorplans working out if rooms were in the right places, if doors needed to be moved, understanding how the space flowed, to make the most of every room without spending money on needless extensions.

Once you have found a house that seems broadly right and is in the right location, start studying the floorplan. That’s my tip for today. Speaking of which – here’s the plan for this house.

There will now be a short interlude while you go and look…..

OK – back? The first thing you may have noticed is that there are lots of rooms. We’re here to talk more about the decor but I will say that I’m a fan of rooms, of walls, of spaces that have individual purposes rather than open-plan living. It makes a home feel bigger if you have different places to do different things and be with different people. If you are planning a renovation, think carefully about whether open-plan living will suit you long-term. Will there be space for one person to watch TV while another listens to music, the radio, or does some work? Can you have dim, atmospheric lighting if someone needs to see to read? Of course, open-plan will be right for some of you. I’m not saying it’s always wrong, I’m just asking you to consider how you live and who you live with, before you pick up a sledgehammer. And my final point: I’ve seen so many huge kitchens with sofas (the middle-class dream – hell, I wanted it myself for a while, but the planning officer said no), and empty sitting rooms nearby because teenagers prefer their bedrooms and small kids want to be where their parents are. The moral is, don’t extend your house to create a huge room if that means another space which already existed lies dusty and unused.

Right, on to the decor – and boom, let’s start with this burst of August sunshine.