Pam Gascoyne Hi Tom, As the focal point of the room is quite definitely the fireplace perhaps you should start with making something welcoming and eyecatching be it with candles, fake but really convincing burning gas coals in the grate or even good lighting it needs to really glow. The room is not really huge and perhaps keeping the walls light with, say, a warm very light grey with similar colour linen curtains or white venetian blinds would lighten the whole room and white bookshelves would be really excellent. A rug is essential but keep it cool too like the John Lewis multi stripe grey/neutral. A print or prints are a good idea and with the neutral scheme you could have anything you liked and pick out a pop of colour from the artwork and add to the cushions. The mirror is definitely too big and too gold. If you want to keep it hang it landscape and tone it right down dry brushing silver leaf over the gold but it’s a good place for a striking piece of artwork you like. Good luck Tom and enjoy your new room when it’s finished.

Not sure whether they are making a comeback, but we have recent experience of both and think it just depends on the house. Our old house was a 1960s build, split level (built into the hill) with a kitchen off the dining room, and the sitting room up three steps from the opposite side of the dining room. From the sitting room one could look down onto the dining room and through to the kitchen. When we refitted the kitchen about fifteen years ago we knocked out the units which divided the kitchen from the dining room and put an island in the space. It worked fantastically well for us; a great place to sit and catch up with the kids when they came in from school, and many times their friends joined us in chat and banter around the island. The house was perfect for entertaining and for our family, even though there was no separate (able to be closed off) sitting room. Although now both adults and left home, our kids were very sad when we moved away and sold the house, as were many of their friends. (Maybe because it was party-central at times...!) We now have an Edwardian semi with a fairly large kitchen at the back, accessed through the dining room, and we have a kitchen table and chairs plus the computer in there. The dining room is for when we have guests, and Sunday lunch when I do a roast, even if it's just the two of us. The kitchen gets the rising sun and is lovely first thing in the morning. Our sitting room is at the front of the house and is smaller and cosy, ideal for snuggling up in front of the log burner at this time of year. And it gets the setting sun which is nice in the afternoon/evening. We can still seat plenty of people though. We thought we had to have open plan as that's what we'd had for so long, in fact what we have now is working perfectly for us. We still have plenty of entertaining space and have pre dinner nibbles in the kitchen before eating in the dining room. In the summer we mostly eat outside as we had the garden landscaped this year and we love it out there. A well designed garden with comfortable seating has proved to be the best thing we've done with a house! Angie

I live in a similar era house. Are you not actually allowed to change the window colour or is it that you don't want them to stand out? I think that black windows would look better so the darker the better. For me the first thing that had to go on my house was the square browns guttering. We changed ours to black and our painted the woodwork underneath the guttering black and it dragged it forward by twenty years. I know this isn't the answer to your question but I thought I would mention it as I have a similar era house.

I would paint them! If you have a look at our Kitchen Refurbishment project on our page, it's exactly what we did. We replaced the hinges and knobs on an old pine kitchen with polished chrome and painted the cabinets. The client cried when she saw it finished, she was so pleased, and her friends and family thought she'd had a new kitchen!