BEFORE
House & Garden[/i] stylist Alexander Breeze's sitting room when he first moved in]
AFTER
The sitting room is a bright, south-facing room with a large bay window. When we first came to look at the flat it was a student house and almost every room was a bedroom, crammed with stuff. The sitting room was no exception, but the bones of the room were good: the original sash windows and the fireplace - the only internal original feature in the flat - remained, albeit stifled by the ancient net curtains and surrounding beige paint job.
Oka[/link]']
The whole flat was in dire need of a bit of love and care. It suffers from out-of-date textured wallpaper and a dodgy kitchen with out-dated fixtures and fittings, so it could never be a chic, elegant flat. Instead I decided to go with its old fashioned oddities rather than attempt to cover them, and try to make something quirky, even downright bizarre in places; both distracting from and - dare I say it - embellishing the undesirable here and there.
'I've done much to improve the rooms and make it feel like home, all of which can easily be reversed or taken with me when I leave.'
Thankfully, we have a very understanding landlady who let us paint. Though we're on a budget, if there's one thing worth spending money on it is paint. It's obvious when you say it, I know, but it's the backdrop to everything else. You see more of the walls than anything else in many rooms, so choosing the right paint is very important. Invariably, better paints are more expensive, but worth every penny. They tend to have much better coverage so you need fewer coats, and they have great depth of colour and warmth - even in their cooler tones, which is key. I used Mylands 'Egyptian Grey' marble matt emulsion in the sitting room (and kitchen/dining room). Every room in the flat needed an ultra-matt paint to hide as much of the heavily textured wallpaper as possible (which, as you can see, is something akin to bark) as stripping the wallpaper was too big a task for a rented flat.
The landlady agreed to get rid of the existing furniture, save a pine bookcase which remains in the same place it was in when we moved in.
Generally, the furniture is neutral in colour, creating a foil for the bright artworks and accessories, like the cushions on the sofa. So, if we decide to go monochrome in the future we can without having to start all over again. The ottoman is from Oka, which, though expensive, should hopefully last the test of time. The largest picture on the wall is a portrait from c.1900 I found, unstretched, at an auction used as a rug (which may account for it's distressed state) and I got it for almost nothing. Re-stretching it cost less than £100, and I always smile when I see her knowing smirk everyday. The thangka of the left purports to be nineteenth-century Tibetan and was a gift.
The imposing picture above the original fireplace was found at auction. It's not everybody's taste, but I'm a sucker for Catholic art and couldn't resist this Christ-like figure. It was described in the catalogue as by 'a follower of Théodore Géricault', so now I refer to it, optimistically, as 'the Géricault'. The mantelpiece is home to lots of odds and ends and pictures of friends and family. The bronze sculpture of Hercules is a Chinese copy of a seventeenth-century original - unusually for lots of Chinese copies, it's the most terrific quality - and I bought it on eBay for a song."
