Whole house renovations are notoriously stressful: the budget that gets bust within months, the builders who fail to turn up, the schedule over-running and the relentless, daily decision-making.
Few, however, face the challenges Rebecca Fordham took on while restoring a ramshackle Victorian terrace house in Ferndale Road, near the buzz of central Brixton, in south London.
‘I’m used to spinning a lot of plates at the same time,’ says Rebecca, a former BBC Newsnight producer, who has also worked with organisations such as Unicef, Global Witness and the Jo Cox Foundation, managing multi million-pound budgets.
‘But it was a very stressful experience. I was doing it on my own, as a solo parent with a young daughter, while also pregnant, and during a pandemic. Living in temporary accommodation while the work was being carried out, I was also home-schooling and project-managing the build.’
Completed about a year ago, the home’s façade and three floors of 1,413sq ft of immaculately interior designed, flowing living space belie any restoration angst. Through Rebecca’s crafty reworking of the floor plans, the house now features a brand-new third floor, four bedrooms, and a light-filled open-plan space for cooking and dining, created out of the narrow former kitchen and side return.
Dark engineered-wood flooring, a palette of eco-friendly paints from littlegreene.com and a unique art collection gathered on extensive world travels are the hallmarks of this home, which Rebecca was determined should 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 on it, in June 2020, when I was in the midst of doing IVF in Greece,’ says Rebecca, who paid about £935,000 for the home, going on to spend another £370,000 on its revamp.
Returning to England at the height of the pandemic, she moved into rented accommodation with her daughter, Mara, now six, and oversaw the year-long, multi-dimensional project, which involved stripping off the ugly pebble-dashing on the home’s façade and replacing it with London stock brick, taking out 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 driven largely by a desire to get back to her roots. Although she had a base in west London, she was brought up in and around Brixton, and was keen to return.
‘When I first viewed the house, however, it was rather sad,’ she says, ‘as all 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 wonderful location, directly opposite a leafy green space, and it wasn’t overlooked at the rear. I could immediately see how I could open it up.’
Frustratingly, she says, many of her plans were met with resistance from her first set of builders, meaning she had to fight for what she knew would work brilliantly.
‘I was advised against having black wood-framed windows, which actually look wonderful, and was told to carpet the stairs, as simply painting them would be too noisy – which turned out not to be true,’ Rebecca says. ‘I really had to stand firm.’ Changing builder – to central London-based kbbmaster.com – was one of her best moves, she says.
Keeping in mind her vision for the house as a cohesive whole was another key to its success, says Rebecca, who also runs ethical sleepwear business @talesofthread. Although each room – kitchen/diner, 24ft 4in-long sitting room and WC on the ground floor, two large bedrooms and a big family bathroom on the first, and two more bedrooms and a shower room on the second – should have its own decorative identity, she wanted, she said, ‘to achieve just the right balance of 19th-century detail and a clean, contemporary look’.
To this end, she researched and reinstated Victorian-era plasterwork, cornicing and coving, including a delicate vine detail in the main living space, and even added scalloped wooden trim to the undersides of interior window ledges.
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 in the street), as well as bifold doors leading from the kitchen to the garden. High insulation factors, state-of-the-art plumbing and eco-cred were also high on the agenda.
Upcycling where possible, she used reclaimed Welsh slate for the roof and salvaged terracotta tiles, from norfolkreclamation.co.uk, for the garden edging.
The interior colour scheme was also meticulously planned. The main palette is white, with a few select hues picked out for bold statement: the stairs, for example, are painted in littlegreene.com’s theatrical Lamp Black, and the archway between the kitchen and sitting room in the firm’s bright-yellow Trumpet. This cheerful pigment is used for the top-floor woodwork, where it contrasts strikingly with lilac Hortense on a door frame.
Flooring and tiling also give rooms their own distinct look, on which Rebecca has spared no expense. As the perfect counterfoil to the simple white Howdens kitchen, for example, she spent nearly £3,000 on the room’s cherry-red herringbone floor tiles, from bertandmay.com, enlivened again by a huge world map covering one of the walls, ‘as a way to bring the whole planet closer to the kids’.
Thought-provoking artwork from all over the globe also helps to serve this purpose. In the main, china-blue bedroom, a wall hanging by Egyptian textile master craftsman Wissa Wassef is now a collector’s item. Displayed in the stairwell are pieces by contemporary Kenyan artist Michael Soi, and a mosaic made for Rebecca by a teenage girl in Libya during the Arab Spring.
In the vintage furniture-filled sitting room, Farrow & Ball’s subtle taupe Oxford Stone creates a perfect backdrop for Rebecca’s collection of black and white photography, which includes Malian photographer Malike Sidibe’s seminal 1960s photograph of a couple dancing, Nuit de Noel.
But as a working solo mum, Rebecca says it’s the practical – yet still luxurious – inclusions that bring her great joy. The inveterate multi-tasker says putting her washing machine on the first floor next to the family bathroom means she can do the washing while keeping an eye on the kids in the bath, with a pull-down Victorian Kitchen Maid clothes airer above (from castinstyle.co.uk) for hanging it all.
It’s been the perfect family home, but Rebecca has now put the house on the market, for £1,225,000. ‘I am moving closer to Clapham, to be nearer family,’ she says. ‘The house is so beautiful, I wish it could somehow levitate and come with me.’
Her time at this house will live on, however, in a novel she is writing exploring the lives of two south London mothers, inspired in part, she says, by her experience of her mixed-race daughter. With themes of origins, belonging and inheritance, the book also features local landmarks, such as the community-run Papa’s Park, a playground and event space.
Is she planning on taking on another renovation project? It’s a no, says Rebecca. ‘Clapham is significantly 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 through another project.
‘I want to make our lives a bit easier this time round.’
Rebecca’s house is for sale through Marsh & Parsons, marshandparsons.co.uk
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