A once bare London flat filled with colour and texture by Sarah Vanrenen

There can be few moves as discombobulating as going from an eight-bedroom country house to a two-bedroom new build flat in London. In fact, the two are worlds apart – especially if you're the first person to ever set foot in said flat and it is, as new builds tend to be, a white box. When the owner of this flat overlooking the Thames decided to downsize from his country home and have a simpler, more modern life in the city, his gleamingly bare apartment was in sore need of some character and warmth. And indeed, a glance at just one of these rooms now, and you'd be hard-pressed to realise that it's a brand new development, such is the genius of Sarah Vanrenen and Laura Hanbury on her team, who were called in to breathe life, colour and layers into the space.

“He was a dream client,” says Sarah. “He was very trusting and simply allowed us to do what we know how to do. There was very little that we suggested which he didn't like”. The starting point for the decoration was the owner's own collection of antiques and art. “We basically went shopping at his house,” Sarah explains. “He gave us free rein to pick out the antiques, art and other things that we thought would work, so Laura and I simply chose all these lovely things and designed around them.”

Key amongst these was an impressive Delft collection, now housed on bespoke shelving in the living room. “If there’s no fireplace in the sitting room, you can use a bookcase to be the centrepiece of the room instead,” explains Sarah. The bookcase is painted in ‘Vert de Mer’ by Edward Bulmer, a colour which runs across the woodwork of the flat, a decorating trick that unifies the entire space." The bookcase faces the large wall on the other side of the room, which was added to house a large oil painting and close the kitchen off from the living-dining space a little more.

Adding the wall was the only intervention they made in the kitchen, but the bathrooms suffered an entirely different fate: “we ripped them out, they were horrible and basic.” In their place can be found a terracotta-coloured loo, with a custom frame around the mirror and one of Sarah's own wallpapers above the panelling, and a bold green ensuite. Here Sarah “tried to recreate the owner's comfortable way of living by putting in alternative flooring, building him a vanity and using his antique mirrors”. The choice of such a strong colour was to counteract the lack of windows and balance the adjoining bedroom, which is a softer space, covered in a Veere Grenney wallpaper which “is a great backdrop for his oil paintings”.

Sarah and Laura also ripped out the existing wardrobes, building bespoke ones in both the bedroom and spare bedroom. The second bedroom is predominantly used as a study, so Sarah added clever touches to facilitate both functions of the room. The wardrobes she designed encompass a built-in desk with a secret drawer, and there is also “a special daybed with a proper mattress so anyone coming to stay could sleep there – but it looks like a really lovely sofa.” All of this is set against walls papered in a Michael Smith design (wallpaper is a theme that runs throughout the flat), chosen for being a “calm but masculine backdrop for paintings”.

It's the use of colour and the balance of old and new that has created such an inviting interior, and it's precisely this alchemy for which Sarah Vanrenen is known. “A house that purely has antiques looks heavy and one that’s purely modern can feel too harsh, clean and sterile,” she explains. Sarah and Laura have achieved a sense of balance not just through the colours on the walls, but the choice of fabrics too. The sofa and chairs in the living room came from the country house and were very traditional in style, but they had all of them recovered to make them feel more modern and fitting for their new surrounds.