Cherry red, ice-cream pastels, honey, cream, and a ‘slightly melty’ ceiling rose: these are the delectable ingredients in this four-bedroom Victorian house in De Beauvoir Town, east London, designed by Waldo Studio. Founder Tom Bartlett (who heads the firm alongside Sasha von Meister) has long been known as a virtuoso of colour; this project reveals exactly why.
The owners – the husband runs a scenic building company and the wife is an event producer – live with their two teenage children and their cat. Tom had known them for a while, and they followed the studio’s work. When they bought this house, its Victorian layout was mostly intact, but it had a few awkward corners – an oddly arranged basement floor, linked to the hallway above by a dark and obtrusive staircase, and a lacklustre connection to the garden. Wanting it to be more joyful, and to tap into the wife’s northern Italian heritage, they contacted Tom. ‘It was very flattering that they wanted us to be involved, as they have always lived very stylishly and without interiors help,’ he says. ‘They were looking to make the house work a lot better for all the family, with an individual, characterful approach. They came with tales of Italian summers and a wish to create a striking but friendly home that didn’t feel precious, and could withstand a lot of visitors.’
The Italian reference fired Tom’s imagination from the start. ‘I thought about colour,’ he remembers. ‘What sprung to mind immediately was the pistachio, vanilla, strawberry and milk chocolate of a 1980s Neapolitan ice-cream – perhaps a bit of a reductive take on Italian culture! Also, that clear blue-and-yellow light of the summer by an Italian lake. This pretty much stuck as the background palette throughout. We then layered in stronger burgundy and green across the rooms.’
Tom always tries to keep any features that are original to a house, or to restore them where missing. Here, cornices had to be replaced, and were sympathetically updated with features like chequered tile floors – a contemporary twist on the traditional Victorian patterned versions. ‘We like the old house to be very present, and new interventions to be easily read as additions,’ says Tom. ‘The traditional hall tiles you see in London are normally black and white, but they can also be this bull’s blood colour. Here, we used tiles by Olde English in the hall to rationalise a complex space with loads of entrances and exits.’ The result is one of his favourite areas in the house. ‘It has an Alice in Wonderland, almost distorting quality of scale and direction that is very appealing, and quite a joyous introduction to the home.’
The old, dark staircase that landed in the centre of the lower-ground floor was banished, and in its place, a new side extension built to accommodate a less invasive design. Bathed in light from above, this has been turned into a dramatic feature, its red-stained wood veneer echoing the oxblood shade in the hallway and contrasting with butter-yellow paintwork in the basement living and dining area. Tom likens it to a lipstick, both in terms of colour and form. ‘We wanted it to seem like a sculpture placed inside a box,’ he explains. ‘It was needed to give the room some depth and drama. We managed to make it multifunctional, too - it has a coat cupboard underneath and a very useful integrated desk.’
The staircase also introduces another strand to the design: curves. This visual language is repeated throughout the house, from the arched doorways in the entrance hall to the custom living-room sofas. ‘The wife had admired a recessed fireplace we had designed previously, which we ended up doing a version of in the main bedroom. She was drawn to the softness of the shadowing and the comfort of the curves. This became the basis of a lot of the big new elements in the house,’ says Tom. He points to the ghost of Italian Baroque style in features such as the black marble living-room fireplace, which also has echoes of Milanese Rationalism and Art Deco. ‘Curves create calm shadows and sensuous shapes,’ he adds.
Of course, colours and shapes are only at their best when materials are equally expressive. One of the richest spaces in this sense is the basement kitchen, where a cooker hood and splashback covered in vanilla, yellow and aqua tiles contrasts with cupboard fronts in a ‘pretty special’ masur-birch veneer and a mix of oak and rubber flooring. The worktops are made of egg-yolk yellow Pyrolave, an artisan-made enamelled lava-stone which is notable not only for its lustrous shine, but also for the delicate crackling it develops during manufacture. Last but not least, the kitchen is also where you’ll find the ‘slightly melty’ ceiling rose, which tops off a jaunty Atelier Areti pendant light.
Masur-birch veneer reappears in the adjacent sitting area’s joinery, teamed with Roman travertine surfaces, Meridiani linen sofas and the family’s treasured Hans Wegner dining furniture. The ever-versatile Pyrolave was redeployed in the main bedroom, where it lines the fireplace, and in the bathroom, in the form of custom green basins that link the room with its garden view. The cherrywood bathroom vanity continues as a table in the dressing room next door and as a built-in sycamore headboard in the main bedroom. ‘This element runs the length of this colourful Victorian house, and gives a great sense of scale,’ says Tom. ‘We try to do new things and not repeat ourselves, and we developed a softness here that we’ll explore further in upcoming projects.’ waldostudio.com
