Brunswick House

This weekend I had a lovely lunch with some old friends (who I really don’t see enough!) at Brunswick House Cafe in Vauxhall, South London. The food was great but what makes it worth a visit is that the cafe is full of “architectural, antiques, salvage and curiosities”, the words of Lassco who are behind the selection of items for sale.

Here are some lights and panelling you could take home (in the case of the panelling kind of out of my price range…).

But better than this there are a range of rooms you can wander through and be tempted.

Need a new jacket?

My eagle-eyed friend spotted these alphabet blocks, the look lovely but “N” is…well…seriously unfortunate…..

To my eyes this one is a bit too grim.

This however I think is awesome.

How about this snazzy toilet bowl.

Or for someone with the larger bathroom….

And lastly I spotted this. I’ve been thinking for some time that a wood burning stove would be really nice in the fireplace in the front room of the main house. The room next to the kitchen. This is the kind of thing I had in mind.

I must have been past Brunswick House hundreds of times. It’s in an inauspicious location, right on the massive roundabout that is Vauxhall train and bus station. I wish I had been in before, the cafe is great and the browsing kind of inspiring.

Up-cycling…

Some time ago the courses at The School of Stuff were recommended to me.

This rather sorry piece of furniture also arrived in the house, a refugee from a previous life as a stage prop.

As you can probably guess I decided to do a five day course at The School of Stuff in upholstery and use this bench as my project.

Five days seems like a long time but my main learning from this course was that upholstery (proper traditional style) is quite fiddly and quite time consuming. So without giving the end away I haven’t completely finished, but I thought a post now with all the stages covered would help me remember what I have learnt so far.

Stage one is stripping back. For everyone else on the course who had bought lovely antique pieces this was a very important stage. They had to document all the layers to help recreate the shape and remind them how the elements fitted together. For me with my rather basic bench this was less of an issue.

What I did have to do however was remove an incredible number of staples, dull work.

The wood frame didn’t look like it would be nice enough to bother stripping back the treacle like varnish. So I sanded it down and decided to paint it white.

Then I was ready to start rebuilding. We could have just repaired the springs that were there and used foam again but I wanted to go for a squarer shape rather than a dome when finished. So it was a complete rebuild.

First up I added webbing which is going to support the springs.

Then we worked out how many springs were needed, their size and where to place them. Once in position and evenly spaced I drew around them in red chalk so they would be easy to replace if knocked. Then they were sewed into position.

Then all the springs are tied together using a clove hitch. I found this quite hard as you had to compress the springs slightly, hold them in place, get the distances between them right and tie the knots.

The springs then get a cover of fabric and the tops of the springs are sewn to this as well.

Into this fabric large ties are sewn to give something to tuck the stuffing into.

I think this stuff is made from coconut husks but traditionally it would have been horse hair.

Another layer of fabric this time put on very carefully to form the corners and the shape of the seat. Once covered the stuffing inside is then “regulated” using  a needle like tool that allows you to move the stuffing around and even it up. Then some stitches are added through the seat to start to hold the stuffing in place using an enormous needle.

The next stage is to stitch round the sides. Again we sew through the seat and stuffing to start to pull it into shape and form a neat regular edge.

And that’s kind of where I got to. I need to arrange to go back in and spend another day or so finishing off.

I have however got the fabric for the covering sorted. We ordered it via the school from a company called Bute and I decided to go with Lime for the base and Dove for the back rests.

So all ready to go….

Before and after – main bathroom

 

In many ways this is the room that has gone through the biggest change. At some point what had been one room was divided in two to make a small galley kitchen which you accessed from the front sitting room and a similarly sized bathroom your reached via the original entrance from the stairs.

There was also a kind of kitchen in the basement so it seems this was done to allow various members of the family to live in the house but with their own space, whilst not exactly splitting the house up into flats.

Whilst the blue bathroom suite was kind of cool these rooms needed some change. First of all we took down the dividing wall.

 We had to re-plumb the entire house at the same time.

This also meant we were removing the only kitchen in the house and working sinks. So we had to keep the “kitchen” sink working in this room for a bit while we set up a new cobbled together kitchen in the downstairs front room which was intended to be the new working kitchen for the house. For a while then you could have a bath and do the dishes in the same room.

Then we started to add things back in. We decided to have a walk in shower which you can see the first stages of in the picture above. Much agonising over the rest of the layout, but the bath eventually went in the centre of the room by the window (only downside is that you flash anyone looking in from the garden when you get out of the bath) and we installed a utility cupboard to house the washing machine. This was accompanied by a sheila’s maid to dry the clothes.

And now it looks like this.

Before and after – main bedroom

Now that some parts of the house can be almost declared “done” I thought it might be fun to look back at how they have changed. First up is the master bedroom. Annoyingly I don’t have too many “before” images, but here are a few.

This was the simplest room to change. We just took up the carpet and painted the floor Farrow and Ball Strong White and chose Farrow and Ball Elephant’s Breath for the walls; a strangely named paint and quite a gentle but beautiful colour. Changed the light fitting and added some furniture.

After which it looked like this.

 

Bargain Hunting

Antiques are often a far more affordable way to buy furniture than buying new. That and you’re much more likely to find something unusual that you won’t see all over the place.

However living in London it can sometimes seem hard to find these bargains. Obviously there is Ebay but that can mean a bit of travel plus you don’t get to try before you buy. Antiques shops tend to either be over priced, full of  uninspiring pieces painted a tasteful colour and presented as something special; or stacked so high with everything on top of each other it can be hard to make anything out.

So it was great to visit Crystal Palace Antiques. It has been recommended before but this was the first time I had visited. Spread over four floors it’s a great mix of pieces with enough variety to happily browse through yet edited so it’s not just a great pile of furniture stacked to the ceiling. Plus the prices seems fair (and much cheaper than the quality new alternatives).

Here are some of the things that caught my eye (which seem to be mainly mid century stuff – my taste must be changing!).

I thought this might work for our kitchen

Looking inside this dressing table,

We found some rather interesting books…

And this is what the shop looks like.

Totally floored

In recent weeks (well months) it’s all been about the flat. However whilst work still continues on the flat there has been some attention to upstairs, namely the entrance hall and upstairs kitchen / piano room.

We’ve been holding off on this part of the house because of all the work going on elsewhere and therefore all the walking through, carrying building items, dragging things too heavy to carry meant we knew it would just get damaged.

But now we felt it was time for some attention. Mainly all that has happened is we have painted the floors – Farrow and Ball Strong White, like the floors throughout the house. This was also the focus of much discussion; white floors certainly show the dirt more and as this is the main hall and communal room that seemed a silly idea. In the end however we realised it’s easy to clean, easy to touch up and the added light seems to balance the darker wall colours.

So here comes a series of images, some taken in the day and some in the evening showing the results.

obviously the fireplace needs some attention - we're not burning books just yet

rug from Ikea...

And in the daytime….

However this just means we have to face the much bigger decision on how we want the kitchen part of this room to be. At the moment it is just cobbled together from existing units and bits of the kitchen that was already there. We’re yet to totally decide between free-standing /rustic and fitted.

New additions

Some colour, some hardware.

The front door has been given a coat of paint, same kind inside and out. It’s Blue Ground from Farrow and Ball.

The surround still needs a final coat and the wall painted where the render has been fixed. Plus there’s a weird bit of cable hanging down that needs to go. So this is only halfway through. We had to add some bars on the door as well, the glass area as slightly bigger than we’d anticipated and given that this door is hidden from sight it needed some additional security.

On the back of this door is a new brass handle, an eBay purchase.  The door had been sticking a bit and this made it easier to close, although that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem anymore. Nevermind, I like the handle anyway.

On the same theme I also bought a door knocker for the new flat front door, also from eBay.

All ready to be fitted.

The bathroom doors also have new additions. On the bedroom side they are from Anthropologie.

And on the bathroom side they were bought by my parents on a holiday.

Final new purchase is this sewing box, it’s supposed to be a mid-century and Danish made, I bought it from Germany.

Quite stylish for a sewing box.

Sitting Pretty

I’ve been working, well doodling in sewing form.

I bought some fabric off-cuts and from one of them I felt I had enough to make a cushion. I covered one panel with essentially doodled imagery. There was no real overall plan just a collection of small sections working across the panel from left to right, top to bottom. Then I cut an equivalent panel and sewed them to gether to make a cushion.

Simple really.

A complete kitchen

Well nearly.

The kitchen in the flat is in and working.

The plan is to add some shelves above these units for storage. Then with this dresser, bought secondhand from the British Heart Foundation (Old Kent Road branch) some years ago now, gives the room a mix of fitted and free-standing.

The door into the lobby you can see here is Farrow and Ball Lulworth Blue which is actually left over from painting the garden shed. The door through to the bedroom area matches.

The rest of the room is starting to feel more complete, although far from finished.

The entrance to the flat has also improved greatly. For starters it’s no longer a death-trap as the roof area has been repaired.

The new front door has been installed. This had to be made for the space as the dimensions are slightly unusual.

Still need to pick a colour for it….

The idea is to paint the exterior well area white so it reflects the light back into the flat. The bars unfortunately will need to stay because it’s a slightly out of sight, plus we need to get a security light working.

The lobby area will be for storage (coats, boots etc). The wires will be boxed in and some kind of cupboard will probably go in front.

Some touch ups elsewhere too. The doors to the bathroom have had a coat of paint. Again using up colours from elsewhere. This is Farrow and Ball Setting Plaster which is the same colour as the sitting room. I think it works really well with the green of the bedroom.

As seen in…

Matthew, a very talented friend and his band filmed a video to their new song in the house. It looks wonderful, and the song’s pretty good too.

See it here.