A TWIST ON SCANDI
With time, effort and a creative touch, this 1930s property has been transformed into a contemporary, bohemian family home
Summer Thornton and her partner Neil were viewing houses in Norfolk, near Summer’s parents, when they got the call from their estate agent about a potential property in south-east London. ‘It was a house we’d been interested in a while before,’ says Summer, ‘so we dropped everything and went to see it, making an offer straightaway! We can always move to Norfolk in the future.’
The property had been well looked after, so the couple were able to take their time before beginning major renovations. ‘We were lucky that the house was perfectly liveable,’ says Summer. ‘It just wasn’t to our taste – there were chandeliers and cream carpets throughout, as well as lots of wallpaper.’
Over the next two years, Summer and Neil laid new flooring and stripped wallpaper. ‘The carpets were the first to go,’ says Summer. ‘We are all a bit messy – we’re quite outdoorsy, so our house can’t be too precious. Cream carpets are a bit too high-maintenance! We went for whitewashed Scandi-style boards, and cosied it up with rugs.’
She decided to use brilliant white for the walls to create a blank canvas: ‘I wanted to freshen it all up and start again, so we introduced colour upstairs slowly, going for different shades of grey.’ The house quickly went up in value, and the couple were able to remortgage to fund the downstairs building work, to extend their small galley kitchen and create a large open-plan kitchen-diner with bifold doors leading out onto the garden.
‘I really enjoyed the whole process,’ says Summer. ‘It was such a relief to start the building work, as I was so fed up with our tiny kitchen.’ Once the structural work was
underway, she designed the kitchen and spent time choosing accessories. ‘I always feel it’s the attention to detail that pulls a look together,’ she says. ‘I trawled Pinterest and did a moodboard for every room, recreating it on my computer so I could really visualise what it would look like.’
Mindful of budget, she also had to decide where to save.
‘We spent money on a really good cooker,’ she says, ‘and a quartz worktop. The bifold doors were also a big expense. I bought all my light switches from Dowsing & Reynolds, but I tried to find other things more cheaply. We have a chandelier in our bedroom from Marks & Spencer that was hundreds of pounds cheaper than one I’d seen in a magazine.’
Summer’s love of Scandinavian design shines through, but is offset throughout the property by bohemian touches and quirky accessories. ‘I feel as though I’ve managed to merge a few different styles together,’ she says.
One of her favourite rooms in the house is the downstairs cloakroom. ‘The Erica Wakerley wallpaper is a gorgeous shimmering copper. A shop on Etsy made the pendant for me, and we decided to put a round window in for a bit of a change. It’s only a small room, but we had real fun with it.’ Summer also used her design skills to create a striking family bathroom. ‘There are three different tiles in there,’ she says, ‘wooden-effect floor tiles, the jazzy ones by the bath and the Metro tiles. Mixing them up has really worked.’
And now the major renovations are finished, Summer is moving on to her next project. ‘I’m always improving
- I can’t stop!’ she says. ‘My next project is to create a studio for me to work in. My mission is to take every part of my house, every nook and cranny, and make it lovely.’