Interior Design

Utility Spaces

The hardest working rooms in a home

You know we love a utility room and here’s a new favourite from our Buckinghamshire project.

Bright colours to keep you cheerful whilst doing the chores, and the eternally useful gathered skirt which can hide all manor of things!

Featuring our very own zig zag stripe fabric in mustard from The Collection by Salvesen Graham.

During the winter, a boot room becomes your favourite room in the house!

We always try and incorporate a chest of drawers in a boot room as they are so useful for small things like dog leads, gloves, secateurs, shoe cleaning kit etc.

Don’t be afraid to get a bit decorative in spaces like this too - pretty fabrics and lovely art to look at while you ready yourself for an adventure outdoors.

Long weekends conjure up ideas of life slowing down, having time to fill our homes with flowers and summer scents.

A sunny nod to this lovely spot from one of our projects a space away from the main kitchen to hide the mess away and get much of the prep done. Here a moment to cut flowers ready to add that extra layer of loveliness to the rest of the house!

Yellow is such a cheerful colour all year round and we love to use it in rooms where you need to get jobs done as it’s hard not to be happy in a room like this!

A bold colour in a utilitarian space can make any chore feel cheerful. It’s also often easier to live with something bold in a room you’re standing up in and busy doing a job, then one where you’re relaxing and sitting down.

As elsewhere in this house, we reused existing fabrics (the pelmet from an old four poster bed) and combined them with new (tea towels made with the estate name) to make a room that felt like the past and present rolled in to one. Which is, for us, what the English country house is all about.

For us there is nothing better than when practical storage can also make a beautiful design feature, as shown here in our Cornish country house project.

Prior to reconfiguring the house this area was part of a dark and dingy 80’s kitchen extension. Now it forms an elegant axis to the back of house areas with views through to the kitchen, garden, eating room and boot room.

The curved shelving displays family china whilst behind push touch panels more unsightly items can be stored! Then on the other side of the room lies the pantry store - painted in a bold blue - and the fridge and freezer both concealed behind panelling.

We’re not big fans of having every piece of furniture built and fitted in a room. Instead we like to repurpose clients’ existing pieces or find new family heirlooms to fill a home.

A chest like this, full of gloves and scarves and the workings of a busy home, ready for you when you dash out of the door had to be antique. The blinds had to be soft and contrasting with the more contemporary new light fitting. This is a boot room (mudroom to our American friends) but it wasn’t built to be utilitarian it was built as a place to gather in readiness or at the end of a long day outside.

The eagle eyed of you will spot this is another angle of the boot room above. Part of the 1980’s extension to this wonderful country house and situated where the kitchen was once located.

If anything this is the more fitted wall of this charmingly unfitted space. Other walls of the room are lined with antique pieces of furniture to store gloves and hats.

Rather than create a room for passing through we wanted a space to gather and discuss the day ahead or the past activities of a long lovely day outside…

This is also the location of some of our favourite window blinds ever!