You moved into The Chatham House in 2016 and have been gradually updating it. What, to you, have been the benefits of renovating slowly?
I’m so incredibly impatient that it’s hard not to want to have everything finished already, but we have both budget and time restraints. Renovating at a slower pace means we’ve been able to truly get to know the house, studying how the light behaves in each room, how we use it, how we want each space to feel and connect accordingly. Rob often catches me staring off into a corner of a room and he knows that I’m ruminating on a color or finish and starts feeling nervous.
There are a lot of fast trends in interiors as with fashion and I can’t stand the throw-away culture that’s part of it, so if I find something I want to apply to our home, I have plenty of time to decide if it’s got legs or not. The hallway has taken 18 months so far, working on it when we have time, and 80% of it so far has been the painstaking process of stripping lead paint from all the woodwork (the house is Edwardian so there’s a lot of detail). At the beginning of the process I didn’t have a clue what to do with it but, now we’re getting closer to deciding on paint and floor tiles, it’s exciting because it feels cemented in my mind.