A writer’s flat in Edinburgh decorated by Susan Deliss

The streets and squares of Edinburgh’s New Town are handsome, but they can feel grey and dour, especially on a drizzly day. This characteristic does not necessarily extend into the interiors of the buildings – in fact, quite the opposite, if this boldly decorated flat on the top floor of a Georgian house at the end of one of the area’s most elegant streets is anything to go by. ‘I wanted the space to feel magical and theatrical,’ says Susan Deliss, the antique-textiles dealer and designer who is behind its decoration.

Anyone who saw the feature on Susan’s own home in rural France in the July 2016 issue of House & Garden will have noticed that this was a house designed with flair. She has a masterful eye for colour and pattern – no doubt honed through her textiles business – and she has always been interested in interior design, citing Bill Willis, an American who lived in Morocco, and the Andalusian aristocrat Jaime Parladé as influences. ‘But it was only when some of my textile clients started asking if I would help with their houses that I considered it seriously,’ Susan explains.

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One such client is the owner of this flat, a Scottish writer who had already purchased cushions, furniture and lampshades from Susan for his London home. When he bought the flat in 2017, he enlisted her to transform the unimaginative interior into a brightly coloured space where he could entertain and write. It is relatively small, with three generously proportioned main rooms – a sitting room, kitchen and bedroom – leading off the hallway. The layout had been chopped and changed over the years, so rationalising it became Susan’s first challenge. Architectural mouldings were recast, door heights were changed to the same level and an unnecessary dummy doorway in the hall was removed. The wooden floors were in poor condition, so she painted these white and layered them with kilims and sisal mats.

When it came to the decoration, Susan set about reflecting the owner’s love of bold, unconventional colours and patterns and incorporating the Arts and Crafts style that he admires. ‘Since all the rooms can be seen from the hallway, we had to make sure that all the colours would harmonise,’ she says. This area, which features a wallpaper based on a 1918 watercolour by the Arts and Crafts designer CFA Voysey, has a fresh, cheerful and surprisingly contemporary feel.

The colours of the wallpaper have been picked up throughout the flat – a jolly yellow for the kitchen, which provides a brilliant backdrop for the owner’s collection of prints and paintings, a grass green for the sitting room, and a fiery orange for a previously dingy north-facing bedroom. ‘The light in Edinburgh is lovely and can take quite strong colours,’ says Susan. ‘It is also a nice nod to the Scottish Colourists – a group of four early-twentieth-century painters, including Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell and Samuel John Peploe, who used colour boldly in their work.’ In the small loo, the reverse colourway of the Voysey wallpaper – a deep blue called ‘midnight’ – neatly ties everything together.

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Textiles, unsurprisingly, play a significant role. Striped Turkish rugs line the hall and an antique Ewe cloth from Ghana functions as a bedcover. Susan’s approach is nothing if not meticulous – the curtains, for example, which are made from hand-printed fabrics by Rapture & Wright and Robert Kime, are lined with pretty ticking from Tinsmiths. But she is also able to balance decorative touches with practicalities: the fitted kitchen was almost new when the owner moved in, so Susan kept the carcass and had the units re-fronted and painted in Edward Bulmer’s ‘Vert de Mer’. She also added a reclaimed marble work surface and a splashback made from antique hand-painted Dutch tiles. ‘We wanted to include colours and details that would excite the eye,’ says Susan.

Susan Deliss is a member of The List by House & Garden, our essential directory of design professionals. See her profile here: thelist.houseandgarden.com/profile/susan-deliss-limited