Interior designer Sophie Robinson makes the most of vibrant wallpaper and colour for her spacious family kitchen
I’m Sophie Robinson, interior designer, TV presenter and podcast host, and I live outside Lewes in East Sussex with my husband, Tom, who’s a builder, and our son, Arthur. We live in a rural setting surrounded by woodland.
When we bought the house we planned to do an extension at the south end which included a large open-plan kitchen-dining room added to the living room. The kitchen was small and dark, situated at the north-facing end of the house, a long walk away from the sunny south-facing views of the garden. But recently we had to shelve our ambitious build. So we simply switched the rooms around instead. Our small kitchen is now a cosy TV snug, and the living room has become a generous family kitchen.
Tom set to work on the build, which included knocking out the small cottage window in favour of large aluminium patio doors, flooding the room with natural light and connecting to the garden. We replaced the wood floor with porcelain limestone, enhancing the feeling of light while being easy to maintain.
The next part was to choose our kitchen. I chose to work with Magnet and opted for its traditional Ludlow cabinet style as it’s fitting for our period country house, but the colour scheme would be where I could keep it feeling fresh and modern. Rather excitingly I have launched a new collection of fabrics and wallpaper with Harlequin this year, so picking a hero print was the place to start. The Woodland Floral wallpaper is an archive design that we recoloured to fit in with a more modern and fresher palette, and I used this to steer the rest of the scheme.
I set my heart on a yellow kitchen as it’s such a joyful and uplifting colour, and paired it with chalk pink base units. I love how the Magnet kitchen designer colour blocked the tall units in the yellow, so they look like a freestanding cupboard. I then added a third colour to the island in deep red, so it really anchors the room. I can’t tell you how much pleasure seeing these colours brings me, all tied together beautifully by the wallpaper pattern. I love using wallpaper in kitchens, it helps give them a strong style statement. If you avoid papering behind the hob or around the sink, it’s perfectly practical. You can even seal it with a coat of matt decorator’s varnish if you want to protect it and make it wipeable.
Creating the layout for the kitchen took the most head scratching – it’s always a tussle between wanting enough storage without f
