Story of a London Home, Part II: The Living Room

A before and after

The room in the house that we made the least changes to was the living room. Unlike the kitchen which was all change, the living room was already a light and bright room and so didn’t need a huge amount of rethinking. So we kept the layout broadly the same, I thought we weren’t really doing much to it… and yet it still ended up looking a fair bit different from where we started. This is how it looked when we first moved into the house:

And this is how it looks now:

The changes we made were cosmetic, rather than structural. We removed the doors between the living room and the study room, which leads off it, to create a greater sense of space, and we added a chimney breast so that we could have a fire in the winter months. Otherwise, that was pretty much it. We put in a large antique marble fireplace (which we sourced here in Brussels) and soundproofed the walls and ceiling (so my husband can play piano in there late into the night without driving our neighbours mad). We ripped out the pre-existing floorboards, which were laminate, and replaced them with reclaimed parquet flooring from Lassco laid in a herringbone pattern (same as in the kitchen) and added a cornice round the edge of the room, and a ceiling rose at the centre of the room with a large, vintage Murano glass chandelier, also sourced in Brussels. And then came the decoration…