Classical Reception & Entrance Hall

As one of London’s top interior design studios, we are privileged to have worked on some very stylish projects in some of London’s golden post codes. The double reception room in this stylish late Georgian house, formed part of a full house renovation which included a basement addition amongst other things. Set back on a leafy street in prime London Notting Hill, Rene Dekker Design worked closely with the architects to achieve a dream home for the family. The works included a full strip out of finishes and services, new windows and doors, all new electrics and plumbing, cooling and heating, as well as a new basement level which would house the playroom/family sitting room plus two further bedrooms.  

The client had already been living in the house with her family for 20 years and was ready for a dramatic change and was looking for a grand colourful scheme, with pattern and colour at the forefront of the brief. We researched grand country houses and extracted details such as plaster mouldings, panelling design, cornices and ceiling roses and worked toward scaling these down to work within our scheme. The client was also very keen to use Zuber and de Gournay wall coverings, having had the joy of living with Zuber’s classic mural Eldorado in her entrance hallway.

We started with the design of the floor based on an image we found of a Classical Heritage marble floor. Made up of basic shapes, this simple yet very impressive floor was made up of Bardiglio and light grey marble and created the perfect ‘grand’ entrée! We added large over-scaled moulded panels in the passage on one side which lined up with the same size mirror panel and entrance door to the right. We chose the panels from the Eldorado mural that we thought would work well in our mouldings with almost no trimming required. We then added a dado and smaller panels up the stair case and included some strategically placed wall lights. Since the mural design played centre stage in this scheme, we pared back the rest of the decorations by using paint, whose colours were picked from within the mural medley. 

The Reception room was treated in the same manner as the hall, using as much moulding as possible and embellishing the walls, ceilings and pilasters. Several Chinoiserie silk wall coverings were considered using colours from turquoise to peach; bevelled mirror was used in the pilasters and we designed a brand new parquet floor using reclaimed timber.