Your hallway is not just a transient space leading to the rooms you actually spend time in – it provides an opportunity to put your personal style front and centre of your home, setting the tone for everything else to come. So, as Katie Mulloy advises, decorate yours with care…
Confession: I can’t remember why, of all the spaces in our house that required attention, we redecorated the hallway first. Yes, fine, it was dull, underwhelming and totally devoid of character but as the contents of our current government prove, that hardly makes it a priority for cosmetic improvement.
Happily, some things can be changed more easily than others and in only slightly more time than is now the average length of a Downing Street stint, we’d transformed the hallway into a space that, three years on, remains one of my favourites of the entire house. Perhaps it became our first project because we could clearly see its potential. It’s an unusually wide L-shaped hallway with French doors at the end of it, which means we can see straight through to the garden from the front door; something TV architects always seem to bang on about on house design programmes. And it just didn’t take much imagination to see how we could make it exponentially better. It just so happened that in doing so – and please do excuse my immodesty here – we absolutely nailed the blueprint for an ideal hallway.
That’s because the best hallways perform a small but robust number of roles. Firstly, and potentially most importantly, they are both the welcome and the introduction to your home. While I’m slightly suspicious of a blanket house-wide adherence to your signature style (revisit my last column for more on this, should you care), I do think your favoured aesthetic should come into play in your hallway. Partly as first impressions do count for a lot, but also because it provides context for everything else to come. It’s the crucial warm-up act and if it’s done well, it has the power to elevate the feeling of your entire home. Think about it in food terms: if you’ve just endured a bland or unappetising starter, the main course is going to have to work so much harder to convince you that the meal as a whole is any good.
Or in self-help speak, your hallway should be the best version of yourself. I would say ignore the trotted-out advice of creating something ‘light and airy’. If you want to go bold or dark and moody, do it. Given that you’ll more than likely be dealing with large expanses of wall as you go up the stairs (if you have them), your hallway actually provides a great opportunity to experiment with colour, statement wallpaper or murals. You
