If there were any room in a London house with a bit of an identity crisis, it is this one. No one knows quite what to call it, no one knows quite what it’s for. In many homes it squats near the front door, neglected by distracted parents shuffling back and forth from the open plan kitchen – the real centre of the home. It might be a single-storey pram park, or a mini-Amazon fulfilment centre – a graveyard for cardboard.
Most of the time, I call it the ‘drawing room’. This isn’t a clunky attempt to be aspirational, although I recognise it has those connotations. It reminds me of my grandparents, whose drawing room was a slightly pompous museum of mahogany (“don’t touch!”). It’s also known as the ‘sitting room’, the ‘front room’ and the ‘living room’. I use all these terms pretty interchangeably, but I like ‘drawing room’ best of all because it underlines the real purpose of this space – not a place to simply ‘sit’ or ‘live’, but a place to ‘withdraw’ to (it started life as the ‘withdrawing room’). Home life can be messy and anarchic – we all need our own fenced-off VIP area.
Above all, we need a place to be by ourselves – a crisp negroni after the children’s bedtime, a quiet glance through the Sunday papers with a steaming cafetière, an afternoon curled up with a mug of tea and a favourite book. But we also need a place to be with others – somewhere to have a jolly margarita before supper, where the only toys are Scrabble and Backgammon (awaiting the next rainy day) and where we can collect beautiful objects, furniture and art. It is a haven; a place of elegance and peace.
For my own renovation, it was actually the room I was most looking forward to designing – a small corner of the house where I could let my imagination run wild without worrying too much about practicality. I can cover my ottoman in a wonderful fabric from Vanderhurd, safe in the knowledge that it won’t be thoughtfully recovered with marmalade or spaghetti Bolognese. I can hang a beautiful painting above the fireplace and go a little mad on cushion fabrics.
But at the back of my mind was always a fear that I would end up with a room that looked nice but gathered dust. “Oh we never use that room, except at Christmas”…says pretty much everyone. Well, rooms aren’t just for Christmas, and I was determined to design it so that we’d use it.
I started with the structural elements. Wanting to stick as far as possible to the Victorian bones of the house, I didn’t change much. It is quite common these days to open up the ground floor but I was keen to keep the two rooms at the front on their own, with a small courtyard between the front of the house and the extension. This allows for the flow of light all the way through the house, but the rooms remain self-contained. Light is so important, so I created a larger than usual door opening from the hallway into the drawing room, opposite the fireplace. The entrance halls of Victorian townhouses are often narrow and dark, and opening up the doorway allowed the light from the bay window to stream through to the hall.