'being brave with colour has really paid off'

Eclectic DIY refurb

In her previous home, Becs had played it safe with a neutral palette, adding colour with accessories and soft furnishings. ‘We’d only intended to live there for five years and ended up staying for 10,’ she says. ‘At the start of lockdown, though, it became apparent that we really needed more space with us both working from home and the children being home-schooled. It was a narrow Victorian terrace, with an open-plan living room-diner and no separate space to retreat to.’

This house was one of the first that Becs and Graham saw when they started their search, but it didn’t grab them initially. Then, unexpectedly, their house went under offer, so they came back to look at this one and realised that it ticked all the boxes. ‘The house was in good decorative order throughout, with easy-to-live-with grey walls and neutral flooring,’ says Becs. ‘So, we could settle in and start living there before beginning to make it our own. In our previous house, when we did the loft extension, I painted our new bedroom in Farrow & Ball’s Oval Room Blue, and I loved the sensation of being cocooned in colour. So, I wanted to use the move as an opportunity to experiment with a bolder use of colour in a way that I hadn’t done before.’

A priority for Becs when they moved in was to paint the fireplaces, which were orange pine. ‘Graham didn’t agree on my colour choices, so I waited until he was away! I am quite impulsive, so I simply went to Homebase and bought Farrow & Ball’s Down Pipe, which I had thought was greyer than it was – it’s actually quite blue, but I think I prefer it,’ says Becs. ‘Thankfully, when Graham saw the colour in situ, he liked it too, and this was the start of his opening up to more use of colour throughout the house.’

As Becs’s confidence with colour grew, she brought it into the dining room too, first with a deep green wall painted in Angelica by Craig & Rose, and then by experimenting with a mural – at which point Graham was much more on board. ‘I knew I wanted a mural behind the table and investigated wallpaper options, but when I realised my chosen one would cost around £450, I decided to experiment with blocks of colour using tester pots. Once I got going, I