SECOND TIME AROUND
DECORATOR SARAH VANRENEN HAS TRANSFORMED A FORMER BACHELOR PAD INTO A SECOND HOME FOR A YOUNG FAMILY BY UTILISING A SIMPLE PALETTE WITH SPLASHES OF COLOUR
A former bachelor pad is transformed into a vibrant family home
When she was a child, sarah Vanrenen told her mother, ‘I’m never going to be an interior designer.’ But this charming house in a south London terrace, its interior newly decorated by sarah, is proof that we do not always know our own minds when we are 10 years old. sarah’s mother, the interior-design doyenne Penny Morrison, simply led by example, designing beautiful and constantly changing houses for the family.
she now has a thriving interior-design business of her own, which she started 12 years ago, though at first she resisted her fate with jobs at Christie’s. ‘I’ve grown up with decorating; you just imbibe it,’ sarah says. ‘It took a while, but now I’m really passionate about it.’
The owner had already lived in his house for 10 bachelor years before he called in sarah. ‘The house was looking tired and grungy,’ he says. ‘It was all red chenille, dark furniture and kilims.’ he now lives mainly in australia, returning to england occasionally. he wanted a fresh, lighter look for his London base, and was keen to incorporate the clean, modern lines and simplicity of australian houses. ‘he is also very much an englishman, and wanted a calm, comfortable house that felt english, too,’ says sarah.
When it came to the design, sarah had two pieces of luck. First, the house is half a size wider than its terraced neighbours, which meant she was able to create two generous, well-proportioned rooms on the ground floor, by knocking down walls and taking over part of the garden with an extension at the back. The front door opens onto a narrow hall, but the house then seems to expand as you turn right into the spacious sitting room. Turn left out of this room and you arrive in a large, open-plan kitchen and dining room. In warm weather, when the doors along the back wall are completely folded back, the small garden becomes part of the room.
sarah’s second stroke of luck was a set of paintings by the client’s grandfather, howard dietz, a vice president at MGM studios in
hollywood in the thirties, who is credited with creating its roaring-lion logo.
sarah was able to design the rooms around his paintings – for example, echoing the shades of green in one above the sitting room chimneypiece in the ottoman that faces it. The walls, painted in Farrow & Ball’s ‘skimming stone’, and the neutral sofas and curtains were her response to the client’s request for calm, but then sarah has brought in a bit of fun with clusters of bright cushions on the sofas, a geometric-patterned rug from robert stephenson and a black-and-white zigzag fabric on a pair of chunky stools.
In the dining area, sarah has mixed different eras: a sixties brass light fitting hangs above a modern wooden dining table, surrounded by bobble dining chairs, which, though new, hark back to styles of the late nineteenth century. an oversize mirror, a Provençal fruitwood cupboard and an ingenious wine rack, designed by sarah and painted to match the walls, make up this ensemble.
If a neutral backdrop with bright touches is the watchword downstairs, upstairs the theory is reversed: sarah has chosen a strong peacock blue for the main bedroom walls. ‘Bedlinen should be crisp and white,’ she says. she used Pret a Vivre’s ‘Bruges’ linen in oyster for the headboard and bed valance, and the blue brings all this white into relief.
she follows the same idea of contrast in the first-floor bathroom, where dark grigio Carnico marble and strong green walls work well in a small space. By contrast, in the main bathroom, mirrored cupboards bounce the light around and give the illusion of a bigger space, while concealing extensive storage. ‘There are rows of highly polished shoes in there,’ says sarah.
The owner loves the look and comfort of sarah’s design: ‘It was fantastic to specify exactly what we wanted for the sofas, for example, and get it.’ he is grateful, too, that she brought out his own taste instead of imposing her own. and now that he is having a house built in australia, he realises to his cost quite how clever sarah was at avoiding potential mistakes. ‘she spotted the glitches before they happened,’ he says ruefully. This seems to come easily to sarah, who has come a long way since her initial reservations.