After six months of muddling through our little East London renovation project, we can now finally start to think about styling the house up in a way which makes the most of the space. No more worrying about windows, plasterwork and damp issues - the fun stuff can now begin.
One of the weirder aspects of our house is the layout of the hallway. Normally in a Victorian terrace you walk in and have the staircase in front of you and rooms off to the left or right. In truly unique, and completely unfathomable style, when you walk into ours you just have a straight hallway covering the whole length of the house which leads straight to the original back door. So essentially you have a really long passage which doesn't really do anything or offer any living space. It just leads to a redundant door (we put a new back door onto the kitchen) and access to the cellar (far to creepy to actually venture into).
I wanted to do something which would break up the space a little and give some personality to the hall - something which is actually really difficult when it is narrow and no furniture will fit down there.
To do this, we decided to use the radiator to act as an anchor point. It sits exactly in the middle of the hall and marks the point where you turn into the house (lounge, stairs and dining room) so it made sense. Finding a console table which was tall enough and wide enough to clear the radiator was near enough impossible unless you went for something which was quite deep but that would have infringed too much for the width of the hall so wasn't really an option. In the end we found this great media shelf from Ikea which was perfect as it was shallow in depth and didn't require brackets to be attached to the wall, so it doesn't look too shelf-like. As £30 it was also a steal. To frame the area I also added a rug and some chosen accessories which bring a bit of character. The metal storage box from H&M is perfect for unopened letters and post so they don't languish on the doormat.
Other accessories are as follows:
Runner - West Elm
Basket - Ikea
Antlers and green pot are vintage items I have collected over time
It is still a little sparse so I expect more items to grow on here over time. What do you think?
H x
