ElegantEdge Interiors

The house had been divided into small formal rooms in 1934 and had resisted three previous attempts to open it up, each of which had left a scar. Our brief was to make the ground floor work for a family of five without pretending the building was younger than it is.

The problem

Four rooms across the rear of the house each had a door onto a dark central hall. Every one of them had a window, and none of them had usable daylight by mid-afternoon. A structural survey showed that the wall between the two central rooms was not load-bearing, which had been assumed for ninety years.

What we did

We removed that one wall and left every other one standing. The gain was a room forty percent larger than anything else on the floor, and the loss was nothing anybody uses.

• Retained and repaired the original plaster cornice throughout, splicing new sections only where the removed wall met the ceiling
• Laid a single continuous white oak floor across the whole ground level, running the boards toward the garden
• Built a full-height oak and plaster storage wall along the hall, which absorbs coats, shoes, a desk and the electrical panel
• Replaced six windows with slimline steel-framed units matching the original sightlines
• Added a discreet second layer of lighting on a separate circuit for the evening

The detail that decided it

The storage wall meets the retained cornice with a fifteen-millimeter shadow gap rather than a scribed joint. It is the only place in the house where new and old touch directly, and keeping them apart is what stops the new work reading as a bad repair.

The clients asked for an open plan and what they actually wanted was daylight. Once we established that, we only had to take down one wall instead of three.

Outcome

The house reads as the same house. Visitors who knew it before the work consistently fail to identify what changed, which the clients report as the highest compliment the project has received. Construction ran twenty-two weeks against a twenty-four week program, and the final account landed two percent under the approved budget.