An elegant house in Chelsea layered with soft colour and thoughtfully curated art

For Annabel Bevan, the renovation of this Victorian townhouse in Chelsea was just the sort of project she craved. ‘We’d been living in Bahrain for 9 years where the interiors were very beige and modern, and I was desperate to create something layered and a bit traditional,’ says the stylist and art buyer, who bought the house in 2016 and now shares it with her three daughters. Having settled on an area – in fact, a few streets with a wonderful sense of community just off the King’s Road – it was the first house that she looked at. ‘I fell in love straight away and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it,’ she explains.

Spread across four floors, the half-stucco, half-brick house had not been decorated since the Eighties. ‘All of the cornices and fireplaces had been taken out and the original rooms had been ripped apart,’ she explains. Fortunately, she could see beyond this, having overhauled her previous homes in Wales, Greece and London. ‘I’ve often taken on houses that have been ripped apart and returned them to their original form,’ she explains. The first task was to find an architect. It was, Annabel admits, an ‘exhausting process’, but she thankfully stumbled upon Russell Taylor Architects. ‘I was looking for someone who really paid attention to the finer details, such as the cabinetry and stonework,’ explains Annabel. ‘He just absolutely got what I wanted to achieve.’

And so began a thoughtful redesign. The basement was given a sense of grandeur by digging down a metre, which has created a beautifully elegant open-plan space that now accommodates a Plain English kitchen, a vast 12-seater dining table and a living area. A small courtyard garden spills out from the kitchen through wall-to-floor doors. ‘I was worried it might feel like a bit of a dark hole, but it’s actually given us amazing privacy and we added mirrors, which give it a sense of openness,’ explains Annabel. At the front of the house in the basement, the room that had been the kitchen became an elegant guest bedroom.

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On the raised ground-floor, the space was reconfigured to open up a view to the staircase from the front door, while walls were added to create an inter-linked sitting and music room, with a soft arch dividing the two. ‘It was a scary prospect to add walls into what had been an open-plan space, but it has actually made it feel bigger,’ explains Annabel. Fireplaces were opened up throughout and fitted with chimneypieces from Jamb. ‘I became fascinated by how originally there would have been a hierarchy of chimneypieces in the house and tried to respect that,’ explains Annabel, who chose discreet York Stone downstairs and the slightly grander Portland stone for the sitting room.

Upstairs, the first floor became Annabel’s own suite, with an inter-connected bedroom, bathroom (with a sunshine yellow tub) and dressing room. The addition of a door between the dressing room and the first floor landing brings much-needed light into the hallway, while also providing a glimpse of the outdoors. Key to the project were the builders, MH Costa, who went above and beyond to get every detail right – right from the major structural interventions to the shape of the wardrobe in Annabel’s dressing room. They even built four blue obelisk-shaped bed posts for her bed, working to a design by the architects. ‘I’m a bit obsessed with obelisk shapes,’ says Annabel, who also has a pair of antique display cabinets of the same shape in her sitting room, which came from the nearby Toad Gallery. The top floor accommodates her three girls’ bedrooms and a bathroom, complete with a bespoke triple vanity unit and a triptych-style mirror above, both of which were made to Russell’s design. Her youngest daughter’s bedroom is particularly charming, with a magical green and pink built-in bed that has been niftily designed to make the most of the space. These colours, Annabel explains, are a good representation of her palette throughout, which mixes blues, pinks and soft neutrals. ‘I wanted the colours to talk rather than shout.’