Inside Leanne Kilroy’s Soulful Victorian Family Home in North London _ House Tour

When I walked in there was something about the scale of the rooms that really spoke to me. We had lived in different variations of terraced houses, you know, in flats, in whole houses, smaller, bigger. The scale of this house really spoke to me, kind of the proportions more than the scale actually. The rooms are just a tiny bit or at least they feel to me a tiny bit more generous than your average terrace. I don't know if that's true but it's the feeling I got. My name is Leanne Kilroy and I'm an interior designer. We live in a Victorian terrace house, a really classic style of housing in North London. The house was built as a housing development in the Victorian, the late Victorian era, probably around 1890, somewhere around there. It has had a few owners. It doesn't have that illustrious of a history. It's a really classic London terraced house on four floors. It's very narrow and tall. When we bought the house the kitchen was probably one of the worst rooms in the house. It was the original outrigger part of the Victorian terrace. It was kind of down four or five stairs from the main level and it was really, really, really cold and dark and damp. The kitchen had, when we moved in, it had probably been installed, like the units and everything had probably been installed 20 to 25 years before and they were kind of raw MDF and they were just falling apart at the seams and covered in oil stains and it was really an unpleasant place to be. So we knew as we bought the house that the very first project we would be doing would be a big kitchen extension really and this house was perfect for that because it was a blank slate in that respect. We wanted a very bright high ceilinged spacious feeling kitchen so we extended into the side return and then we also extended out the back of the original outrigger. The reason that we did those two extensions was because that is what we could get away with without planning permission in our council. We have a little side extension and a little back extension. By American standards these are tiny extensions. I think we added on maybe, you know, 12 to 15 square meters, like really not a lot, but it just completely changed the feeling of the space and it increased the ceiling height really, really significantly. So when we were designing the space we had the glass roof as the anchor and the other anchor for me was the feeling of having a Victorian orangery or conservatory or having just as much glazing as we could afford and as much ceiling height as we could afford. Those anchors dictated how the kitchen ended up being and the feeling and the function. Essentially the kitchen itself is a five meter run but we have a very, very large cooker, 1.2 meters. We have a very, very large sink which is 1.2 meters and then we also have stairs coming down into that five meter run and we only have one upper cupboard which holds our plates and glasses. But, you know, dishwasher, bins, there really isn't a lot of storage space so we had to be creative about how we were going to store all of our kitchen kind of kit or kitchen bits as keen cooks. So that's why we had to kind of carve out this drinks cupboard and we have the pantry. It's a really important part of the kitchen because wherever you are looking back into the house you see it so it's important that it's pretty and so often that part of the kitchen ends up being the refrigerator which is not that pretty to look at unless it's integrated but that wasn't in our budget either. So I went to eBay to find these doors and I had to wait and be patient. So often is the case when you're looking online for vintage and antique pieces to find something that would fit perfectly and then once I did the builders kind of created the opening to fit the doors and the interior is really really simple. I painted it quite an intense color because the rest of the house is very very pared back so having a little tiny little space where you can have more fun is always nice and it's just MDF. It's really really simple. My mother-in-law made the curtain to kind of hide the microwave and toaster but again it was just a super super functional space that's why all of the shelves are very meticulously spaced just so there's no wasted space in there. This apothecary holds a lot of significance for me. My dad had a Scandinavian antique furniture store for my whole life. He started it just before I was born and he just closed it during COVID. It was just a little shop in Boston where I grew up and I saw this apothecary in his shop one day when I went to visit him. I think I must have been at uni at the time and I just said like that is mine. I have to have it. So because it was an expensive piece I think I still had to pay cost for it. I think I paid him what he paid for it but it has been with me ever since. So after uni I moved to Australia for six years. It came with me. After that I moved back to the U.S. for a couple years. It came with me again and then it moved with us to England when we moved here 10 years ago. There's something about it that is like indescribably pleasing about the proportions of it and I once had an architect friend who came over actually in my Australian days who said that it's there's something about the height of each drawer is the same as the width of the drawer below or above or something like that. There's something kind of mathematical which is an explanation for why it's so pleasing to the eye but not only is it pleasing it's also so useful. We have all of the junk that comes with life lives in the apothecary so my sandals, batteries, hot plate holders, tea towels, you know sunglasses, everything. It holds everything. This collection of copper pots belonged to my parents. They lived in Paris for almost a decade just before they had kids. My dad worked in the restaurant industry and they lived very close actually in the first to this very famous copper pot shop that's still there that I'm going to mispronounce so I'm not going to say it. They weren't using these pots they were just hanging out in a cupboard in their basement so over a few trips home to Boston I brought them home in my suitcase. I don't really use them I totally could use them but for me they just are really beautiful they're decorative. I like how the cooking splashes age them over time actually every time my dad visits he polishes them because he's that's how he is and it's really sweet. The bench in our kitchen is actually called a settle which is a word that I learned when I bought it. The moment I saw it I decided we needed it and you know the timing wasn't right our renovation had only just started we had absolutely nowhere to store it and we actually had been planning to because of space restrictions have a built-in bench here. We rejigged everything to fit this amazing piece in and it really makes the space because we have a lot of angular lines in this room we have the rails and the bars on the glazing we have the pitches of the roofs which are very angular so having this wavy topped bench softens it and it's also just such a unique incredible piece. The garden has been an ongoing project when we first bought the house it was a gravel pit it had a few dead or dying trees in it that needed to be removed. We had absolutely no budget to do anything so the way that I approach the garden is kind of impulsively I use it as a form of therapy I guess or relaxation I go out there and I putter away I treat myself to a trip to the garden center every once in a while and just you know spend way too much money there but I really really love puttering around the garden. I don't really know what I'm doing to be honest but when I began I had a vision of having evergreens covering most of the kind of walls of the garden and roses. We planted I think there's about 10 different jasmine or the same but 10 jasmine evergreen jasmines and clematis six different rose varieties from David Austin and everything else is just kind of bits that I experiment with some things die some things don't but I hope over time the things that are thriving will kind of continue to thrive and it'll become even greener. I spend so much time out there I really love it another reason why it was so important for us to have a beautiful garden was because our kitchen is so full of glass so we had to you know we want the view outside to be really really pleasing. So this is the front room in the terrace the classic formal living room I guess. We haven't changed too much in here this is one of the rooms that had the original cornicing and the original rose maybe not original rose but old rose that spoke to me and the original marble fireplace around. So actually we do have plans in the very near future to put a wood burning stove into this fireplace which will mean losing the tiles on the side but I have been told they are not original because this room is so cold because we have single glazing we have a basement underneath that is not insulated it's just unpleasantly cold in the wintertime so we do need another source of heat so we're going to put in a fireplace which I actually think will mean that we use the room so much more in the winter. At the moment we use it my eldest daughter uses it a lot for homework she sits there and does her homework we sit there and chat sometimes but it is for the most part a formal living room it is another place to sit that is a little bit more a tiny bit more formal I mean it's still not very formal but a little bit formal than the rest of the house. The middle room of the house is the classic kind of dark middle room in a Victorian terrace that so often gets forgotten or serves as a passageway and we really wanted it to be a very functional space so as every space in the house so we use it as the kids playroom tv room it's where they hang out and they do their art projects where they watch films and tv every day it's also where we keep all of the books in the house so it has a really cozy feel to it it has no windows it gives onto the bright kitchen and onto the bright front room but in and of itself it's like a very cozy place. So the most recent large project we did in the house was our bedroom and the adjacent bedroom which we turned into a ensuite slash family bathroom. We transformed our bedroom and the bedroom adjacent into kind of a primary suite as they call it now I suppose so we have a walk-in wardrobe area that is partitioned off of the bedroom area in the same room. The reason that we did it this way is because I absolutely did not want to lose the original cornicing in the room which is really really special so we have this kind of freestanding closet really that also forms the wall that our bed sits up against. It also means that the part of the room that our bed is in is a little bit more intimate and cozier and is kind of all centered around a beautiful fireplace which actually we found on the street and it's not original to the house it just means that this otherwise quite vast room has more walls for us to put storage on so we've got drawers and the tall storage for our clothes and that's more than enough for us that's all we've got in terms of clothing storage and then this lovely armoire in the corner holds most of the household linens so the sheets and things like that and then I have my little vanity in the corner so every little part of the room is being made work hard and then we also have a door into the adjacent room which is now our bathroom. In this room we opted for micro cement it has a lovely matte look to it and it looks like normal plaster walls. We really did work on the layout quite a lot because I thought oh maybe we should have inbuilt storage in one of these alcoves maybe we don't really need this decorative fireplace in here but actually at the end of the day form went out a little bit over function here because I thought having the balance of the two rooms that are quite connected to each other they should both really have fireplaces so this all of the fireplaces in the house at the moment are purely decorative and we decided that one alcove will be kind of a his one will be hers we have identical sinks and mirrors and vintage wall lights and the symmetry of everything and the function of everything just it has an incredible feel and actually my kids I think if you ask them they'll say that this is their favorite room in the house. Another thing we did in here that's unusual for a bathroom is we left the floors the original timber which I feel really strongly about I really don't love the feeling of tile especially under your feet when you get out of the shower I love the warm feeling of wood and as long as the lacquer is good enough it will be fine you know if you're using a bath mat especially. Again this feeling that the room is not brand new it's not clinical and it feels like it belongs to the period of the house. This little stool is another piece that came from my dad actually so I think this was my bedside table when I was a kid at some point in my childhood this was definitely my bedside table because when Eric and I dated in our first few years of high school he carved our initials into it so it has his initials and mine with the 2001 in a heart. So the home office was the only real bathroom in the house when we bought the house and it was really a nasty room it was it's north facing really really dark really cold and the ceiling was very very low corner tub that was full of mold and had brick it was just a weird unpleasant space. I really just wanted to kind of rip everything out including the ceiling because I knew there was this pitched storage space above so we lofted the ceiling we removed some of the beams just to give it a little more sense of height and we painted it a muddy brown so that it didn't interfere too much with the brick above the ceiling height. And that is Eric's home office I prefer not to work from there because it is quite dark and cold which he as a Scandinavian loves very very much. Technically I say it's a four-story house but actually it's kind of more like six it's kind of like four and then two half stories because you come down a little bit to go into the kitchen and then you go up half a flight and there you have your landing utility room office and then you go up another half flight so yeah like four with these little extra little floors tacked on. This landing space where I keep a lot of my samples there's a skylight above that was here when we bought the house and it means that it's a really functional space that I can kind of store my fabric samples my wallpaper samples tiles things like that and then opposite is our utility room which as Americans we absolutely needed a utility room not on the ground floor we wanted it closer to the bedrooms which is where we generally traditionally have them in the U.S. This room was a kitchen when we first bought the house it was painted bright orange like nauseating very very deep orange and we used it as a kitchen for the eight months that we did the downstairs renovation. The very end of that renovation saw us turning that kitchen into was then our family bathroom for a long time because it took us a few years to do our bathroom. I usually don't have themes or anything when I'm designing because I think they're really I don't know silly and will go out of fashion but in this case I knew you know with three daughters we kind of lead into a little bit and we painted everything pink. Another reason for the pink though just in my defense is that pink is a really human color and a really warm color so when you're looking in the it casts a beautiful glow back on your face so the light bounces off the pink and it just makes everyone look kind of healthy so that was another reason why I chose pink. The lampshades we just painted ourselves they're just very very you know two pound lampshades that we painted with leftover ample pot paint. I want this house to feel welcoming. I want everyone who walks in to feel like they belong here and I want it to feel comfortable and also beautiful. I don't know if that's a feeling but I want it to feel like it could be anybody's house. It's not a show home. It's not really even a home for my job which I do use it for all the time. It's really a home for our family and for everyone who comes in and for our guests and I want it to feel like a place where people belong.