When Fearghas MacGregor was picking his way through the few, dismal apartments in central London that he could afford to rent in 2011, he looked so miserable that the real estate agent showed him a flat that hadn’t yet come on the market. It was in the King’s Cross neighborhood, an easy commute to his job as a general insurance actuary and within walking distance of the School of Oriental and African Studies, where his American-born wife, Regan Leahy, was studying for her master’s degree.
But the fifth-floor apartment was small — just 430 square feet. The kitchen stove had three tiny burners, and there was a sticker on the oven, “as if it was new,” Mr. McGregor, 37, recalled, although it obviously wasn’t. The sticker read: “Made in West Germany.”
The couple nonetheless signed the lease and moved in. Eight years later, they were able to buy the place for 465,000 British pounds (about $581,000 at the time), and to think about investing in a renovation. They hadn’t gotten much further than fixing up the hallway, though, when the pandemic hit.
In 2022, post-lockdown, they regrouped and hired Sara Leonor, a designer they’d met after walking past her storefront studio in the nearby Islington district and peering through the glass.
“We were upfront about how weird our house was,” said Ms. Leahy, 35, who is now a consultant advising companies about sustainable practices. Dating to the early 20th century, it was a building type known as a mansion block. Because it was built without central heating or plumbing, interior comforts had been introduced in ad hoc ways through the decades. Among the home’s oddities was a fireplace in the bathroom.
Furthermore, the walls were solid brick and not easy to reconfigure. The clean sweep of an open plan was impractical, but the couple didn’t want one anyway. They liked that the flat was “old-fashioned and characterful, inasmuch as there’s no straight lines anywhere,” Mr. MacGregor said. “We would need someone who was going to take it as an exciting challenge, rather than as a blank slate.”
They decided to transform the flat with color, working with the designer to develop a vivid chromatic scheme that gives a different complexion to each room.
“They actually pushed me to the boundary,” said Ms. Leonor, 44, who is originally from Spain. “I don’t think I have done so much color in any of my projects as I have done with them.”
The palette began with Ms. Leahy’s request for a green kitchen. Although King’s Cross recently evolved into a stylish and popular neighborhood, it remains industrial and burdened with traffic. The emerald Ms. Leahy craved felt both period-appropriate — something an Edwardian might appreciate — and evocative of plant life and nature. The porcelain-tile flooring, by the postmodern designer Nathalie Du Pasquier, now evokes cobblestone streets. Copper countertops and fixtures add a touch of steampunk.
From the green kitchen, it was a short conceptual hop to a yellow-accented bathroom. After years of living in student housing and a rental, where surfaces defaulted to gray or white, Mr. MacGregor found the indulgence in bright buttercup tiles intoxicating. “Oh, hang on, you can just do this,” he recalled thinking. “You can just put bright things in.”
The inspiration for the deep-blue bedroom was more tentative. Before hiring Ms. Leonor, the couple had painted a wall that hue. “But it was quite covered up by closets and things, so we didn’t really feel like we got the full effect of it,” Ms. Leahy said. Ms. Leonor brought the blue to the fore, creating frames of painted molding into which she inserted botanical-patterned paper. She duplicated one of the armoires and painted both pieces to match, giving the idiosyncratically shaped room some balance.
As for the brick-and-pale-coral living room, the colors complement a midcentury-modern sideboard that the couple cherished, and the use of light and dark shades is an easy way to suggest paneling with nothing but paint.
Continuing the vintage vibe is an upholstered bench that holds vinyl records below the seat, and a bar cart where Mr. MacGregor mixes drinks when they entertain. (“We can’t have a wet bar in the corner of the room for all kinds of Victorian plumbing reasons,” Ms. Leahy said.) The coffee table in front of the sofa expands for dining.
As her clients took the lead in invigorating the palette, Ms. Leonor saw her main job as finding clever ways to stash items. Medium-density fiberboard shelves were installed high on the bedroom and living room walls and painted the same intense colors as the ceilings and trim, so they seem to dissolve when viewed from certain angles. Similarly, a metal grid that floats in the bathroom is used for horizontal storage and as a plant hanger.
Far from being fazed by the home’s “weirdness,” the designer counted on discovering new possibilities every time a wall was opened. Suddenly there would appear, say, space in the bathroom for installing a cosmetics shelf.
The renovation was completed in the winter of 2023 at a cost of about $300 a square foot. Neither Ms. Leahy nor Mr. MacGregor regret any of their bold choices.
“Sometimes people worry that the design that you come up with is not matching the one in your head,” Ms. Leahy said. “But the green kitchen is what I envisioned and wanted, and so are the rest of the spaces.”
Living Small is a biweekly column exploring what it takes to lead a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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