FAMILY HOME
UNTOUCHED FOR 30 YEARS, THIS PROPERTY WAS THE PERFECT BLANK CANVAS FOR ANNIE AND RICHARD RADLEY TO FILL WITH COLOUR
FEATURE MELANIE WHITEHOUSE PLANS RICHARD HOOKWAY
Kitchen-diner
‘The bench was chosen for flexible seating – you can fit lots of children onto it. Also Richard and I often sit on the bar stools when working from home.’
HOME NOTES
Annie Radley, an HR consultant, and her husband Richard, an IT executive, live here with their children Eliza, four, and one-year-old Alice, as well as Richard’s sons Aidan, 15, and Theo, 13, and rescue cat Fuzzy.
A five-bedroom Victorian terrace in southeast London.
THE LAYOUT
Leading off the hall is a living room at the front of the house. An open-plan kitchen-diner forms the heart of the home, with a utility off the kitchen, and in the middle of the layout is a shower room/cloakroom. On the first floor, there’s a main bedroom with en suite, two children’s bedrooms (one doubles as a guest room) and a family bathroom. On the second floor, there are two boys’ bedrooms and a mezzanine with a den.
P utting their stamp on a property is a must for most homeowners but Annie Radley was able to renovate this tired house and give it a new lease of life with colour and pattern, creating a vibrant and practical family home.
HOW DID YOU END UP HERE?
We rented a flat nearby while we waited two years to buy the right property, so we were delighted when we found this house, which hadn’t been touched for 30 years. It was perfect for the kind of renovations we wanted to carry out. We loved the good Victorian bones of the house and wanted to keep the faith with these while giving the inside some TLC and adding a modern extension to the rear. It had a quirky layout that was a bit different to the other Victorian properties we’d viewed. And it was opposite a small park, making it ideal for our children.
WHAT WORK HAVE YOU HAD DONE?
In 2017 we gutted most of the inside, replumbed, rewired, replastered, repainted, and repaired all the original floorboards. We installed an en suite in the main bedroom, gutted and replaced the family bathroom and removed a loo to make the adjoining box room larger. Unfortunately, the new bath didn’t fit and we had to slice off chunks of architrave, then restore them. In the smaller of the second-floor bedrooms, we took space from the loft to create a high, double-bed ‘deck’, and converted separate loft storage space into a new mezzanine ‘den’ by opening up the loft acces
