Live Breathe Decor

Over the past week I’ve been working on the preliminaries for a renovation of a house on a steep hillside with great views of the river. The house hasn’t been touched decor-wise for 30 years, and the brief for the renovation is ‘industrial artisan warehouse with lots of light’. I’m really excited about the potential of this project! Here are some pics of what the main rooms look like now:

This is the main open-plan living room, with dining room at the far end, lots of windows and doors opening to the deck that overlooks the river.

You can see the door to the galley kitchen on the left. The back of the kitchen bar was covered in the same green carpet as the rest of the house! There are a lot of interesting ceiling lines in this house, but also a lot of weirdly-placed lights and switches, which will all need to change!

Looking back the other way down to the hallway that leads to two of the bedrooms. The house has a mixture of lots of different timbers. Some of the ceilings are lined with beautiful timbers which we want to keep, while others and the stairwell wall here are lined with pine, which I’m not so keen on. I’m generally not into ‘feature walls’, but I want to do something different on this timber-lined wall, and at the moment I’m thinking painting it charcoal.

Yikes! The master bedroom will benefit from new lighting, flooring, window treatments and of course, that wallpaper has got to go! But it has great views, and a glass corner that juts out from the building, which you can see through the windows in the living room. Wish I had a pic of this, but you might understand what I mean- very mid-century architecture.

So, I sometimes find it helpful to show clients pictures of the sort of look that I have in mind for their homes, and I’ve found a few in my files that are pretty close:

Like this: painting the sloping ceilings white but leaving some of the nicer timbers to accent against the white. Also love the feature fireplace in metal and the timber and iron coffee table against pale floors.

This is pretty close to my vision, too: I’d like to use pale flooring throughout the house but the entry is sort of separate, and I’d really like to inject some more grey in here, by using large slate tiles for the floor. Love the timber and leather pieces. I’m also toying with what to do with the timber staircase. I love this simple metal version, and I would like to introduce some steel somewhere..

The bare bones of this room (above) are much more rustic than what I’m working with, but love the furnishings!

Sorry, dodgy pic of a magazine, but love this open-plan warehouse-style room, hints of timber and metals, white walls and ceilings and pale flooring. I’m interested in the idea of having a pale base to keep things really light, but introducing darker finishes - with a lot of pine to paint white we are wary of a Scandinavian white-washed everything or beach house look, which would be totally wrong in this house.

Here I’m drawn to the glossy white-washed floors and walls, paired with a dark wall and the timber and iron table. I do so love this British Colonial sort of look!

This is another alternative I was tossing up for awhile- keep the pine-lined ceiling, and offset it with some black details - love the sleek glass stair balustrade paired with the steel beams and the wood ceiling.

This is a very Scandi-ski lodge sort of look, but the timbers paired with natural elements like the seagrass flooring and the bamboo blinds really works.

What a view!

So that’s a bit of my week, hope you’re having a good one! x