Inside a Victorian West London Home Reimagined by Designers Caroline & Felix

Hi Luxury Home Show, I'm Caroline. And I'm Felix. Together we run Zulufish. We specialise in luxury interior design, architectural design and design and build. And welcome to our family home in West London. Come on in. We kind of really wanted to sort of showcase some of the trends that we're seeing in kitchen design at the moment. We've added the first floor extension there which forms a master ensuite bathroom. So this is my daughter's bedroom. I can honestly say she was probably my toughest client. So welcome inside to our kind of entrance hallway area. It looks a little bit different now to what it did when we first looked around this house 13 years ago. Do you remember? I do remember and there were so many different spaces and we really saw the vision in bringing it all together and creating a space with lots of space and light. Yeah it was kind of, it was arranged as bedsits and everything was kind of falling down around us. But as soon as we kind of walked in we kind of saw the potential here and it was arranged at the time a traditional sort of Victorian style with the kind of staircase here. But we wanted to create more of a sense of occasion on arrival and I think you know we always try and do that in our projects don't we and with the entrance halls. And also there were no architectural details so this is a very beautiful Victorian house but all the architectural details were completely stripped out. So that was one of the main things we wanted to do breathe life back into the house. Yeah and make it kind of timeless but also with some sort of contemporary touches. And it really just on sort of entranceways it's really interesting psychologically because we've noticed that on our social media postings our Instagram postings the entrance hallways are always the most liked shots. You might think it might be the hero piece of joinery or a stunning architectural piece but no it's the entrance hallways. So I think we as humans are drawn to that kind of first impression of the home and it's something that we try and really instigate in all our projects. It wasn't immediately that we thought we've got to relocate the staircase but essentially a staircase is just a big piece of joinery and I think once we had the idea to do that it really unlocked the space here didn't it? Yeah and I think one of the fantastic things about this hallway was the three meter high ceilings so we really wanted to maximise that so it was how we could layer in lots of beautiful materials to really make that very relevant. Yeah and then kind of because we've got and this is a feature you'll see throughout the house we've got great ceiling height and then what we decided to do was to create this space introduce this wall of joinery with some storage area up here with these kind of little objets with the nice wallpaper detailing behind with some sort of shallow storage and shoe storage here in the middle and then this vision panel which is a fire rated vision panel into the front room. These rooms can often be forgotten but actually the link that we've created here works really well. So now we've talked a bit more about the hallway why don't we take you through and this by the way is our furry friend Wish who's very much a prominent member of our household and conveniently works perfectly with the palette it wasn't planned but she couldn't be more aesthetically in tune with the house. This is a really nice piece that we sourced from LA and from the Rose Bowl Market along with the vintage lamps up here so we always try to integrate vintage pieces within our schemes. I love this is a great story actually for this one because we were at the Rose Bowl Market it happens the sort of first Sunday of the month by the Pasadena Stadium in LA it's an old vintage US post box outside of this beautiful cladding it's all a bit rusty and bashed in but we saw it and you fell in love with it straight away didn't you? Yeah it was very old and beaten up but I thought it would be absolutely perfect as a real focal point for the hallway so we shipped it back it weighed 50 kg it was really heavy. Yeah that's right when we brought this back the challenge was really to kind of make it a thing of beauty apart from just the front pieces so we made this piece with Hux which is our sister joinery company and really a sort of important part of our kind of whole offering we have a workshop out in a little village called Penn Street between Amersham and High Wycombe in the kind of that furniture making heartland of Buckinghamshire and when we brought this back and brought it to the workshop there was a few scratch heads as we figured out exactly what to do but yeah we really made a beautiful piece here and sitting atop it are these lovely botanicals so these particular ones are by Abigail Ahern and it used to be quite kitsch having artificial flowers but that's just not the case anymore so I just think that they add something really beautiful to the space yeah and because it's very high ceilings as well it kind of it looks a little bit lost so you'll see that on a couple of places here where you've used those flowers and it really does kind of fill the space in a soft but colourful way yeah and behind it we had a very large bespoke antique smoke mirror made which then reflects and bounces the light all around the hallway which is really fun we also layered in this beautiful woodblock print wallpaper by a company called 1838 it was originally came from the V&A archives and it adds a real sense of craftsmanship to the hallway which I think works brilliantly with the panelled wall underneath yeah that's a nice background to these sort of lithographic prints that we sourced again where were they we got them from the yeah actually we found these from the affordable art fair and it's actually a Spanish architect who designed them and I really loved his sense of printmaking and all the detail he's put within them and that's it's really nice with these lights that they were another sort of flea market find that's right they were also found in the Rose Bowl market so that day we had a real you know bonus day where we found lots of fantastic vintage pieces so this is our main kitchen living room yeah these kind of open plan living areas at the back of the house it tends to be how most of us live now in these kind of properties and I think something that we're always really conscious of is they can be quite sort of boxy when you put a larger extension on the back of a period property so we're always thinking very carefully about how to soften them but also how to zone them so that every space is working and really sort of earning its keep but also adding that kind of architectural interest to make sure they're not just sort of boxes yeah so more often than not most people don't really do much with the ceiling but in interior design terms we call it the fifth wall which I think is a really nice little phrase that's coined so this particular one has a nod to Art Deco as you can see it was really difficult to plan it because we had to think about the skylights so it was beautifully designed in terms of the layout so the natural boxing fits inside the skylights which really brings your eye upwards and of course the other thing to think about when we were planning the sort of the very detailed moulding and the patterning on the ceiling was how that interfaces with the lighting you'll notice that we've got actually very few spots in this space rather than kind of rows and rows of architectural spotlights it's more kind of task lighting we have spots which are picking up the art or lighting specific areas of the kitchen and they kind of form part of the overall lighting scheme not dominating it yeah and I think that it's very important in these very large spaces to really layer the lighting so for instance we do have these little pin prick hidden spotlights within the ceiling we also have task lights that sort of light down into the islands but they're also very beautiful decorative pieces also over the table as well beautiful chandeliers and I think with the joinery pieces that you'll see a few of in the space and just generally that the sort of lighting that you embed within the joinery becomes really part of that layered lighting doesn't it? yeah definitely and of course you know the lighting and how we light the underside of the kitchen really sort of feeds into this whole room but come and see a bit more about the kitchen so the kitchen we designed and developed with Hux our sister company and we kind of really wanted to showcase some of the trends that we're seeing in kitchen design at the moment you'll notice first the kind of door design we call this a micro deco shaker everyone knows shaker doors that are a bit of a sort of a thicker frame but we're always trying to sort of play with that idea and riff on that idea a little bit so the the sort of concept of the micro shaker when you take the the frame and make it a bit narrower has caught on quite a lot in recent years and then we've added this extra detail this sort of little deco nod which ties in with the corner scene details that we put on the ceiling and of course the beauty of the bespoke kitchen is you can have kind of anything whatever door design you want but anything whatever size you want so we always go for quite nice wide drawers here it really lends itself to sort of a bank of three with these kind of dovetail walnut solid dovetail walnut drawer boxes in here and then that kind of bank of three and I particularly love these kind of sort of space age controls for the hob we've got quite a lot of space here so we went quite generous and we couldn't decide between the induction or the gas so we actually we went for one of each and actually it's been great because if you really want to like do some wok cooking and you know really high heat you use the gas burner but for every day you know if you had to choose I'd always go induction every time because it's just super convenient easy to wipe down and really really efficient one feature you always think about a lot in kitchen design as well as the splash back so you can sometimes use stone or back painted glass but what we've done here is we've gone for these kind of hexagonal metallic tiles which kind of look a little bit like fish scales and catch the light really nicely and they also kind of emphasize some of the sort of other chromeware that you might have like the kind of sort of retro toaster and things so it pulls everything together really nicely here it's also a good idea in a particularly in a sort of a larger kitchen or where you're introducing an island to maybe think about using different materials so what we've done here is we've retained the same door design on the island but we've done this in a veneer and I think it looks really elegant actually it's worked out really nicely and it combines beautifully with the kind of Armac Martin handles which you can see a kind of side it's burnishing over time but this is a smoked eucalyptus dyed veneer which is really really beautiful very tactile and you can kind of see the kind of gradation of the veneer as it goes through the drawer boxes another advantage that we had here with the high ceilings is we've really sort of extended the cabinetry all the way to the ceiling and again that's the beauty of this boat rather than sort of being working on a fixed wall cabinet height you can kind of go all the way up otherwise you're going to get a bit of a dust trap on the top of the unit and you may not use what you have on the top shelves but it enables you to really maximize your storage which is critical in London homes and again we've introduced more sort of pull-out storage here we do loads of different types of storage whether they're kind of double doors with drawers in here but what we've gone for particularly in this house is really sort of useful pull-out storage so here this is accessible from kind of either end so it's really practical and this is a great use of space with this kind of wire frame again because it pulls everything forward so you're never kind of struggling to find something at the back of the shelf but it pulls forward on all sort of tempting bottles of nuts and other snacks in this one so we spent quite a lot of time figuring out how to do this sort of feature wall here as well so we went for the quad formation with these Gaggenau ovens so we've got kind of combi microwave, steam, conventional oven and the all-important coffee machine with this kind of warming drawer tucked in below with sort of really nice deep pan storage below and to frame both of them which would work really well is the kind of separate fridge and freezer so you can go get a load of space in there but it all looks really seamless and elegant and here we've got the kind of top units on kind of push latch so again you're maximizing that storage space and of course one of the most important decisions you've ever got to make with your kitchen is what you put on the worktop we really love using natural stones this is a quartzite which is one of our sort of top choices really for kitchen worktops because it has all the qualities of a marble in terms of the movement and the veining but it's super durable so you don't have to worry about turmeric, red wine, citrus it's bomb-proof pretty much and it's very very sort of organic and warmth and tactile and I think what works really well here just on the worktop is how we've introduced this sort of radius curve to really sort of soften the space and I love the way it's mirrored underneath on the base of the island so you have that lovely fluted effect in the smoked eucalyptus veneer yeah this was quite a sort of challenging one to make we have to form, we have to make a former to create the radius and then each of these strips was individually cut and applied but it links really nicely because this smoked eucalyptus is the same product that we actually used on the main dresser we designed this beautiful piece of cabinetry and I love the way the veneer and the patination runs down the drawer fronts and onto the cupboards the framework of the cupboard doors is a black and steel and it pivots very seamlessly and the LED lights are cut at 45 degree angle so there is never any glare in your eyes which is a really lovely part I love the way this space is delineated between the kitchen and more the formal dining space this dining space really was inspired by the main piece of artwork at the back by an artist called Brian Corson and it's a really fantastic piece actually because he was walking in Brooklyn and the area was filled with squatters who were being evicted from their art warehouses so they tipped all the paints over the edge and it ran down the front of the buildings and he caught the shot which is a really nice story so then we blew it up to a bespoke size which fits perfectly behind the dining table so I love the way the colour palette for the artwork really informs design scheme for this whole room and as you can see the turquoise in the painting really feeds down into this slab of beautiful marble yeah and this was a table that we built with with hooks again but it was actually a really funny story when we kind of went to do you remember when we went to pick the stone? yeah yeah and I printed out a photocopy of the artwork and took it to the slab yard and I was basically matching it across all the slabs to see where the beautiful coordination of colour would work so we kind of asked them to just to pull out some crazy stones just to show us because when you look at the painting there was actually pretty much every colour in the rainbow there to have and then when they go to a stone yard they lift them out on these kind of huge cranes and these massive slabs of stone as soon as you saw this one yeah so as soon as I saw it I knew it was the perfect piece it's a Brazilian amazonite quartzite and the turquoise picks up perfectly from the turquoise in the piece of art and I love the lovely light as well which lights the table it elongates over the table it creates a lovely pool of light which is great when you're having dinner it has these beautiful crystals which create a really lovely cocooning glow so to finish the dining table scheme we sourced these 50s vintage chairs from the old cinema which is a curiosity shop on Chiswick High Road and they're clad in Brentano fabric which is a lovely chocolatey textured weave which gives a real kind of comfortable sense yeah well they're comfortable to look at they're comfortable sitting as well and I think you know the kind of it's really nice where you have the flexibility of having the kind of space for the dining table area and the kind of island space here and we use them both don't we? you know we kind of everyday sort of snacks we'll sit at the island but it's really nice to sit as a family to sit around the table obviously entertaining as well to sit around the table but having that dual space in an open-plan space works really well yeah and as part of the zoning we introduced this kind of feature fireplace here interestingly this would be a good great place to hide some structure if you needed it but actually we didn't need to do here this is purely aesthetic but we wanted to kind of create the division of the space but also a focal point for the open plan room and this kind of lines up with the kind of return leg of the kitchen and opens up into the kind of nice kind of snug study area here so in this space we have a vintage roche-bourbois sofa and it's clad in a fabric that looks like a chanel fabric so it's really colourful it's really cosy and underfoot we have a rug which Zulufish designed in collaboration with Jennifer Manners and it has all these gorgeous mossy greens and I love the way the rug brings the outside in over the coffee table you have this iconic piece a Castiglione Arco marble floor lamp which is a real showstopper and picking up on the on the colours of the rug and bringing that outside in is the home bar that we've designed here and kind of with the verdigris stone here in the bar works really well sort of the backdrop to the bottles we've also introduced this kind of fluted glass as a natural diffuser which picks up the kind of the colours behind but kind of mutes them and brings them through nicely yeah and on the wall is a really lovely piece of art by one of my best friends Susie Lipman it's called Tequilas with Limes and we love to shake up some cocktails in an evening and drink them underneath the artwork yeah it's a great place for mixing the margaritas kind of finalizing this space I guess is the disco ball which is an integral part of the space to kind of you know inject some fun both the space and the evening dinner parties yeah the marble floor lamp also is in that lovely chrome which glints off the disco ball at night and kind of completing the space is not the most glamorous bit but it's essential in designing family homes you know we design a lot of family homes and those of you who've had kids up till the age of 11 they want to be where you are so if you design this beautiful kids room that's great as long as you want to spend all your time in there here they want you know when they're young they want to be with you so we designed this space so they could be here within the same space as us and feel connected but without us kind of having to always be supervising them really yeah and then at the end of you know a day if we're having some friends around for dinner we can literally just pack up all their things slot them into the cupboards and it's almost as if they haven't been here for the day yeah you can tuck in get your margarita and not see the mess so the temptation on a lot of these kind of rear extensions is to open up with a full wall of glass that didn't really work in this property particularly because we've added the basement extension here which is actually home to our design studio so what that meant was that we were instead creating this kind of large vision panel here which is fantastic because the light really floods in there and creates this beautiful place to sort of sit in the snug during the day and then it's balanced by the double doors here and then it kind of creates this kind of unified look on the back which is really nice and what we've done kind of on the on this rear extension is we've added this artificial sort of box hedging planting to kind of soften the look and above that you can see we've added the first floor extension there which forms the master ensuite bathroom which is unusual to be able to get that permission for in a conservation area but was really informed by how the neighbouring property had been kind of previously developed so as soon as we saw it kind of I realised that we would probably be able to add that very valuable extra square footage so from the kitchen we enter into the main living room and the flow is really lovely between the two from the main lobby and the ceiling heights are really amazing they're three metres high and the coffer ceiling does this wonderful thing where it makes it feel very light and airy but then at night when the light is on it brings it down and it feels much more cocooning also between these two spaces we have a very large picture window looking through the picture window it frames the three pieces of artwork beautifully and I love the way it picks up on all the colours from the hallway so you've got the teals, emeralds and the corals and also the colours in the marbled lampshades and they really pick up on the colours in the cushions and at low level we have this lovely Matthew Hilton sofa it's feather filled, it's actually deceptively comfortable and then we have the chalong and a very lovely vintage rustic coffee table that we picked up at a flea market 15 years ago and it's all very cosy and very very easy to relax and chill at night so this really is a great place for family living this room really is used by the whole family whether it be music, the girls, piano, the guitar or the big media wall where we all kind of snuggle down at night and jump on the sofa so the media wall is a real sort of show-stopping piece the background is in a chocolate polished plaster which is a lovely cocooning colour it also hides the TV which has a black frame the fireplace is elongated and it's really cosy at night and underneath we have dartwood veneer AV cupboards which hides all the clutter we also have the speakers inset into the fireplace so it's all quite seamless floating shelving with hidden LED lights underneath and on them we have lots of our art curiosities on the top shelf we have artwork by Giuliana Loveday who's a really good friend of mine and abstract artist lots of things we've picked up on our travels so this is an ancient marital headdress from China and some of my favourite pieces of pottery are the Sophie Cook vases of which we have many pieces and they have these lovely fluid organic forms as we move through to the window area the tops of the curtains are hidden in the ceiling recess and that creates really lovely sight lines which means that all the tracks are hidden and it also creates really lovely simple contemporary drapes either side of the windows so we've nearly finished the ground floor and I'd just like to show you the powder room so this is a really lovely jewel-like box of a room it's really special and we've taken the flooring through from the hallway all the way up the back wall which provides a really nice sense of continuity on the walls Felix in his previous career used to be a travel writer so we've got lots of great stories about all our travel adventures together and this really informs my love of interior design through all the things I've seen Right, shall we go and see some bedrooms? What's quite interesting here is how the staircase relocation has kind of played into the design here and what we've done is kind of rather than just tuck the stair right under itself we kind of drew this in a 3D model and really extruded it so we could really capture sort of a feeling of space and light so there's a connection between the ground floor and the top of the house and that sort of really lets this area breathe and create some real interest Welcome to our master bedroom so throughout the flooring we have natural oak floors which are treated with lime wash that creates a really lovely natural feel they've been installed 15 years ago but as you can see they still look absolutely immaculate the lighting scheme is very layered you have a beautiful statement piece and the table lamps where the light is diffused by a ceramic glow we then move through to a large picture mirror which really elongates and expands the place visually the bespoke pieces of furniture were designed specifically because we wanted to match it in with the comfort white grey of the walls so they were sprayed to match exactly and then lastly for the soft furnishings we layered dusky rose, magenta pink, nicki jones cushions to create that really lovely beautiful colour palette and moving through to the first floor terrace as you can see this is an example on the left of a roof terrace which is just a flat roof which hasn't been dressed at all but can you see what a difference it makes if you just lay composite stone millboard cladding which is super durable and you also have you know topiary and lovely planters that really line the space so when we bought the house this was two rooms across the back and then we knocked these through into one to create the kind of principal suite here looking out over the kind of conservation area gardens because it was a much nicer outlook more private more quiet and then we were also able to add the extension here at first floor that we saw earlier so because of the way we've designed the room the wardrobe area becomes kind of a real sort of focal point so rather than have this look like cabinetry we wanted to make it look more like a paneled wall so we created this kind of linear 3D effect on the joinery and then that kind of opens up to reveal your kind of wardrobe storage and this leads on to the ensuite and you'll notice that we've kept the sort of door ceiling heights really tall throughout the house this kind of aligns with the French doors over here but it creates a real kind of sense of occasion as you come into this room what we've done I think quite successfully here and we always strive to do is create those points of architectural interest so here you can kind of see the shape of the roof and this mirrors the shape of the roof externally and then a simple thing to do would have been to put a flat roof structure in here but actually we thought let's mirror that shape and let's echo that to bring some more interest into the room we created a frameless glass shower enclosure here that was again oversized often if you're buying off-the-shelf shower enclosures they kind of cut at 1800 high and you have to have some sort of chrome framework here we've used a glass structural beam at the top to tie it all together but it just allows it to kind of breathe again a bit like the height of the doors one of my favorite aspects of this bathroom though is the kind of double vanity and the very sort of tactile irregular hexagonal tiles here and they're a great example of Caroline's textural and sort of tactile background as a designer they'd be hopeless in a wet environment cleaning them would be a nightmare but as a feature wall here they look really kind of striking so this is our guest room and the natural wood flooring from the principal suite rolls through seamlessly throughout but the difference between the two spaces is that this really is our guest room so it feels to feel very cozy very nurturing very cocooning and this is shown through the pallet which has these chocolatey grass cloth wall coverings it adds a real sense of texture and character to the room we also have these rugged fur throws that are really cozy and cocooning and the layered lighting scheme really adds another layer so we have the crystal chandeliers and the wall lights and it creates a lovely warming effect so in the guest suite we have the walk-in wardrobe and the guest on suite and it's just really useful for our guests so here we are at the top of the house this space was very much configured for family living we have our daughter's bedroom the library and her bathroom I'm going to now show you her bedroom so this is my daughter's bedroom I can honestly say she was probably my toughest client I thought this would be a great opportunity as an interior designer to do something quite wild something bold quite colourful but she really reigned me in she wanted to do something that was you know sophisticated and would take her into adulthood so we finally settled on a palette of eau de nil lots of lovely neutral tones natural materials and rattan and I think she's probably right it will stand the test of time Thanks Luxury Home Show, that's all from us so I hope you've enjoyed the tour it's been fun and if you want to find out a bit more about us you've been inspired check us out in the links below see ya bye Hi Luxury Home Show, I'm Gigi and I'm Ebba, an interior designer from Sigma London welcome to my home in Chelsea at that time a single woman trying to do a project on your own