Cosy, earthy lounge and hallway upgrade in Oxfordshire.
After living in their home and doing some DIY over lockdown, our clients were looking for a change of pace to take their living room and entrance hallway to the next level - creating a welcoming, warm and elevated space for hosting, snuggling up to watch a film and with some more practical features to suit guests, pets and themselves a little better!
Plain new build to characterful cottage vibes
We love a new-build as much as the next person, but they can feel very “copy and paste”, with white walls, plain short-pile carpets and lack of texture. This is how our clients felt when they moved into their home in North Oxfordshire in 2019. After a few years living their and a time in abundance during the pandemic to play with, they managed to create a light and bright space across a few keys rooms in the house, just via DIY. However, after a few years and changing tastes, they felt it was time for an upgrade and to create a space that felt grown-up, cohesive with the rest of the house, but still with character and personality.
Vintage finds
Environmental impact, as well as the goal of introducing texture and a rustic feel to the space was key for our clients. At Realm, we’re used to working with vintage pieces and sourcing from a wide range of suppliers, including: charity shops (why not make your house look wonderful and support a great cause!), Facebook Marketplace, antique cellars and more. For this project, we made vintage and thrifted our highest priority, so we started looking for pieces at the earliest stage of the project to ensure we had plenty of time to find the right pieces. Over time, we sourced a range of items for both the lounge and hallway, including:
Travertine stone coffee table (very heavy!)
Freestanding, claw-foot, iron candleabras
Two stone occasional tables
Two marble occasional tables
M&S Home barley twist standard lamp (via FB Marketplace)
Dark oak bureau/ writing desk
Mid-century glass sliding cabinet
Plus accessories including a table lamp, four paintings candlesticks and more
Top tip: Plan for the sourcing process to take longer if you want to incorporate cost-effective vintage pieces. We scroll through resale sites and drop into stores as often as we can to ensure we snap up the best pieces for our clients, but there are no guarantees. It certainly is fun though!
A whole new meaning to “floor to ceiling”
Because our clients wanted to achieve a cosy, warm and earthy feel to the room, we thought outside the box and chose to recommend, not just painting all four walls in Dulux Heritage Setting Stone, but also the woodwork and, crucially, the ceiling. While, typically, the goal is to create the illusion of height in a room, in this case we decided to embrace the cocoon feel, as the room is almost exclusive used when you’re sitting down, we could get away with bringing the room in to achieve our clients’ vision of cosiness.
The hallway has a different energy, with a welcoming light base and a busy, vibrant wallpaper, depicting mediterranean terracotta, earthy green and pops of light blue - on the top half of the walls only - it feels as though you’re being pulled into the home.
Having ditched the greige carpets throughout the majority of the downstairs in favour of a gorgeous dark wood laminate, the home is cohesive, has a grounded feel and is unrecognisable as a standard new-build, just as our clients requested.
Check out everything we helped with:
Paint colours/ decorating
Wallpaper
Hallway panelling / dado rail
New flooring throughout the ground floor
Furniture (some new, plus incorporating existing pieces)
Decorative elements
We can’t wait to continue with more of this house in the future and we’re excited to keep trawling the vintage sites for cost-effective, affordable vintage finds that can elevate future project schemes. Get in touch to find out how we can help you!
Along the way…
