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Be inspired by this interior designer's Hertfordshire home
Interior designer Jane Conway, her husband James, and their youngest child have lived in this Tudor-style, A-frame Potton kit timber house in St Albans, Hertfordshire, since 2011.
This resourceful couple were drawn to their St Albans house – built in the 1980s, with five bedrooms and three bathrooms – in the knowledge that they could vastly improve it with some immediate cosmetic work. In need of some love, it had been on the market for a while, but the property's simple timber construction offered Jane, James and their three children a spacious contemporary alternative to the Victorian semis they'd been used to.
Just before the start of the pandemic, they had begun work on a large extension to the main kitchen/diner. 'The house was a C shape at the back, so we filled in the middle and went upstairs with a low pitched roof,' explains Jane. Now a beautifully light and airy living space is the result of knocking through into the old utility and dining rooms.
Upstairs, there's a revamped bedroom and refurbished bathroom, with a new dormer providing extra headroom. 'It had an apricot corner bath and a shocking shower with brown not-in-a-good-way tiles,' she says. A stunning feature of the new bathroom is the peacock blue herringbone tiles.
As a result of the various lockdowns, builders stopped working, so Jane and James got on with the renovations themselves. 'We were desperate to move things along,' she says. 'We did all the flooring, and it turns out we're quite good at tiling.' That said, the renovation wasn't without incident. 'When we were putting the flooring in the bathroom, we had to lay a self-levelling screed, which we ambitiously started at 10pm,' explains Jane.
'We had a giant food mixer on the end of James's drill. I was standing in the shower tray saying "it's not levelling" as he was pouring it in. We burst into hysterical laughter as we were so tired. No sooner had we poured it, we decided to abort and scrape it all off. But the residue was actually flat, so we put the tiling straight onto that.'
Originally, the property had six bedrooms, but Jane says 'our daughter found it spooky because there was a funny hatch door in between her bedroom and the one next door, so we knocked that wall down. Now it's a really nice light room'. To create a sense of space in the main bedroom, and because Jane doesn't like having 'a loft full of junk', the ceiling has been removed, exposing the original wooden trusses up to the eaves, which have been lightly whitewashed.
The palette for the kitchen/diner was inspired by a green vase bought in Spain. 'I just loved the colour so that was the starting point,' says Jane. She decided to use green on the vaulted ceiling, echoing the garden seen through the French doors. In a happy accident, the tiles behind the Aga were mistakenly sent in pink instead of the green shade they had ordered. Rather than return them, Jane decided to potato print them. 'As they're encaustic, they're porous and took the paint well, and I sealed them afterwards. At less than 20p for the potato and a few squeezes of acrylic paint, I think that's what we call a bargain,' she says
Another win for the couple was the kitchen units. The first design fell through because the factory was closed due to the pandemic. Then, in an old magazine, Jane saw colourful units from Danish company &Shufl, which provides Linoleum-covered doors to fit IKEA carcasses. 'I designed the kitchen using IKEA units and sent the plans to Denmark,' explains Jane. 'Within four weeks, the beautiful pale pink doors arrived along with the oak drawers we'd commissioned. We actually prefer the end result to our original plan, and it's proved very practical.'
Loving the pale pink with the dark green, Jane tried a little Fila Silicon Finisher from Topps Tiles on the newly plastered walls and 'it was brilliant, totally water-resistant and not discernible at all. It's turned out to be a really nice colour,' she says.
Desperate to get their kitchen completed, Jane and James had to give up on their plan for an Italian terrazzo worktop and have quartz instead, which they sourced from a quarry in Watford. 'Just before the fitters were due to arrive though, I realised we'd forgotten to find a leg for the freestanding end,' explains Jane. 'Running around looking for inspiration, James found a faulty floor lamp fashioned from turned mahogany that would do nicely. He cut one end off and turned it upside down to hold up the worktop – the fitters didn’t suspect a thing.'
So despite all of the lockdown challenges, the couple gained support in the shape of an old lamp stand, and were delighted with their home's transformation into something as unique as it is beautiful.
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