REAL HOME
When Charlotte and husband Oliver first viewed their Georgian apartment, they discovered all of its original features had either been stripped out or damaged in the name of conversion many years before. ‘Our apartment is on the first floor of a Grade II listed house, built in about 1771, and originally it would have formed the drawing room at the front and the morning room at the back of a four-storey house,’ explains Charlotte. ‘The morning room was so called because it was lit by the morning sun. When we came to see the apartment, plasterboard had been used to divide it into a hallway, living room, bedroom, bathroom and a kitchen with a walled-off area hiding a big airing cupboard and water tank. As a result some of the old cornicing was missing or chopped in half where a stud wall had been put up.’ But that wasn’t all, the apartment itself was in a poor state of repair. ‘The bathroom was a dream of pink acrylic, we had threadbare and stained carpeting throughout, the kitchen was tired and the living room had an ugly tall pine mantelpiece housing a gas fire with a boiler behind it. Large gas pipes were on show and that 1970s favourite, woodchip wallpaper, was everywhere, adorned with surface wiring. However, we loved the big bay window at the back which took up most of one wall of the bedroom.’