Whole-home renovations are notoriously stressful: the budget busts within months, the builders who don’t show up, the schedule that runs out, and the relentless, day-to-day decision making.
Few, however, face the challenges Rebecca Fordham faced in restoring a dilapidated Victorian terrace house in Ferndale Road, near the bustle of central Brixton, to the south London.
“I’m used to running many boards at once,” says Rebecca, a former BBC news evening producer, who has also worked with organizations such as Unicef, Global Witness and the Jo Cox Foundation, which managed budgets of millions of pounds.
“But it was a very stressful experience. I did it alone, as a solo parent with a young daughter, while I was also pregnant and during a pandemic. I lived in temporary housing while the work was being carried out, I also provided home education and construction project management.’
Completed about a year ago, the house’s facade and three floors of 1413sq ft impeccably interior designed, fluid living spaces belie any fear of restoration. Through Rebecca’s crafty editing of the floor plans, the house now features a brand new third floor, four bedrooms and a light-filled open space for cooking and dining created from the narrow former kitchen and side return.
Dark parquet floors, a palette of eco-friendly paints from littlegreene.com, and a unique art collection collected on extensive world travels are the hallmarks of this home, which Rebecca determined to be a perfectly practical yet stylish retreat for her growing family.
“I wasn’t pregnant when I bought the house, but I was when I completed it in June 2020, when I was doing IVF in Greece,” says Rebecca, who paid around £935,000 for the house. is going to spend another £370,000 on its refurbishment.
Returning to England at the height of the pandemic, she moved into a rental home with her daughter Mara, now six, and oversaw the year-long, multi-dimensional project, which involved removing the unsightly pebbles on the house’s facade. and replacing it with London stock brick, removing virtually every interior wall, installing two new boutique hotel-worthy bathrooms, and having a new staircase built.
She finally moved in when her second child, Reuben, was 10 months old.
Such a huge undertaking, Rebecca says, was largely driven by a desire to go back to her roots. Although based in West London, she grew up in and around Brixton and was eager to return.
“However, when I first saw the house it was quite sad,” she says, “because all of its original character had been lost over the years. The window frames were old and the dark rooms had peeling paint and worn carpets. But it was in a beautiful location, directly opposite a leafy green space, and at the rear it was not overlooked. I immediately saw how to open it.’
Frustratingly, she says, many of her plans met resistance from her first set of builders, meaning she had to fight for what she knew would work brilliantly.
‘I was advised not to use black wood-framed windows, which look beautiful, and I was told to coat the stairs as it would be too noisy to paint them alone, which turned out to be untrue Rebecca says. “I had to really stand my ground.” Changing Builder – Towards Central London kbbmaster.com — was one of her best moves, she says.
Keeping her vision of the house as a cohesive whole in mind was another key to its success, says Rebecca, who also owns an ethical nightwear business. @talesofthread. While each room – kitchen/dining room, 24ft 4in-long sitting room and toilet on the ground floor, two master bedrooms and a large family bathroom on the first, and two further bedrooms and a shower room on the second – wanted its own decorative identity, she said. them, ‘finding just the right balance between 19th century details and a clean, contemporary look’.
To this end, she examined and restored Victorian-era plasterwork, cornices, and cornices, including a delicate vine detail in the living room, and even added scalloped wood trim to the undersides of the interior window sills.
However, to create the light, airy feel of a modern home, she installed Velux windows at the top of the house and oversized windows (probably the largest on the street), as well as double doors leading from the kitchen to the garden. High insulation factors, state-of-the-art sanitary facilities and eco-crew were also high on the agenda.
Upcycling where possible, she used reclaimed Welsh slate for the roof and salvaged terracotta tiles, from norfolkreclamation.co.ukfor the garden edge.
The color scheme of the interior was also meticulously planned. The main palette is white, with a few select shades chosen for a bold statement: for example, the stairs are painted in littlegreene.com‘s theatrical Lamp Black, and the arch between the kitchen and the sitting room in the firm’s bright yellow Trumpet. This cheerful pigment is used for the woodwork on the top floor, where it contrasts strikingly with the lilac Hortense on a door frame.
Floors and tiles also give rooms a unique look, where Rebecca has spared no expense. As the perfect counterpart to the plain white Howdens kitchen, for instance, she spent nearly £3,000 on the room’s cherry-red herringbone floor tiles, from bertandmay.comrevived by a huge world map covering one of the walls, ‘as a way of bringing the whole planet closer to the kids’.
Thought-provoking artworks from around the world also help to serve this purpose. In the porcelain blue master bedroom, a tapestry by Egyptian textile master Wissa Wassef is now a collector’s item. The stairwell features pieces by contemporary Kenyan artist Michael Soi, and a mosaic created for Rebecca by a teenage girl in Libya during the Arab Spring.
In the vintage-furnished sitting room, Farrow & Ball’s subtle taupe Oxford Stone provides a perfect backdrop for Rebecca’s collection of black-and-white photography, including Nuit de Noel, Malian photographer Malike Sidibe’s groundbreaking 1960s photograph of a dancing couple.
But as a working solo mom, Rebecca says it’s the practical — yet luxurious — inclusions that bring her much joy. The inveterate multitasker says that by placing her washing machine on the first floor next to the family bathroom, she can do the laundry while keeping an eye on the kids in the bath, with a pull-out Victorian kitchen maid clothes airer above (from castinstyle.co.uk) to hang everything.
It was the perfect family home, but Rebecca has now put it up for sale for £1,225,000. “I’m moving closer to Clapham to be closer to my family,” she says. “The house is so beautiful, I wish it could somehow float and go with me.”
However, her time in this house will live on in a novel she writes about the lives of two South London mothers, inspired in part by her experience with her mixed-race daughter. With themes of origin, connection, and legacy, the book also features local landmarks such as the community-run Papa’s Park, a playground, and event space.
Is she planning to take on another renovation project? It’s a no, Rebecca says. “Clapham is considerably more expensive than Brixton, so I doubt I’ll have any money left over to do a renovation project,” she says. “Besides, I’m not going to put my family on another project.
“I want to make our lives a little easier this time.”
Rebecca’s house is for sale through Marsh & Parsons, marshandparsons.co.uk
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