‘It's goodbye to MONOCHROME'

By starting with a fresh white palette and then adding colour, Rebekah’s 1950s house has become a warm and welcoming home

- KAREN WILSON

Our previous home was a three-bedroom 1930s doer-upper, which I bought in 2013 with my husband Nathan as a stepping stone,’ says Rebekah. ‘But when our daughter Jaime turned two, the time was right to move to a bigger house in a nicer area.

I’d scrolled past this house a few times when searching online but I wasn’t sure about it as I didn’t know the area very well. Since there wasn’t much on the market at the time, Nathan convinced me to view it and I’m really glad he did.

We were bowled over by the large hallway and could see the house had huge potential, even though the separate kitchen and dining room felt small and dark. Having four bedrooms was also a big bonus as it’s nice to have a spare bedroom for my family visiting. Luckily, we sold our house within a week so could make an offer straight away.

The hard work

Our first job was getting a builder to knock down the wall between the kitchen and dining room – we found him on mybuilder.com. He also blocked up the dining room door to give us more wall space and laid the large concrete-look floor tiles. When the wall came down, it made such a huge difference.

Making it homely

One of the features I was happy to see the back of was the horrible electric fire in the dining area. Since the space has three radiators, we didn’t need a new fire. Instead, we cleaned up the exposed brick, got a tiler to create a hearth with monochrome geometric tiles and filled it with plants.

At first we painted the whole room white but it looked a little too bland so we added Pitch Black by Farrow & Ball in the alcoves. I later realised a warmer colour would work better as it’s a north-facing room, so we changed it again to Sulking Room Pink.