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.”

Mike Garlick

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”.