"It still feels like home. Just nicer"

The owners of this house in Edinburgh didn't intend to give it a complete makeover, but once they started they just couldn't stop

- Malcolm Jack

It all started with a dining table. A great big heavy wooden Victorian thing that sat in the living-room bay window of Drew and Frances Wallace's elegant, quintessentially Edinburgh semi-detached period townhouse on a quiet leafy street in Morningside. It had been the family's home for 30 years, and the table was a happy hub of activity, around which the couple and their three daughters would assemble daily for meals, with friends and relatives joining them at Christmas, all crammed in.

But, as Drew puts it, "you need to evolve". As the Wallace girls grew up and started drifting away, leaving the house to just their parents and dog Harvey, Drew and Frances decided in 2019 that it was time to do one of two things. Either sell up and downsize, or start sorting out their tired-looking but still beloved home - beginning with their cluttered and gloomy living room, with that space-hogging table (shifted there by necessity some years previously, when the dining room was sacrificed to form a fourth bedroom).

That's when the Wallaces dropped in on venerable Edinburgh interior design studio Jeffreys and had a chat with Georgina Fraser - then a designer, today Jeffreys' managing director, after she bought the business in 2021 together with her business partner Jo Aynsley.

"They said, 'Oh, we think we'd like to do up the living room a little bit," Georgina recalls of that first consultation. "They had a space that was trying to do so much. It's a generous-sized house, but when you break it down into maybe five adults in there, trying to use that living room for dining and watching TV, and then also having loads of family around sometimes, it was too much."