I'd love to go wild in my cloakroom, but I also have to store my Henry Hoover, steam mop, ironing board and a shed load of coats in there too! It drives me a bit bonkers. It's crying out for some gorgeous deep downpipe panelling and lovely owls of the world wallpaper, and a beautiful big mirror..... but instead I've got to figure out how to use every inch of space to hang coats and stored light bulbs, as well as having it as a useable toilet. My boys always seem to need to go at the same time :-D

Hi Claire, Your more than welcome. The advice to use a "local" architect is a good one, he will know the area, the various legislation in force for your district and he should be on talking terms with the local councillors so his advise will save you a lot of time. I would advise you to ask him to do a full survey, interior and exterior, ideally you need an architect that can transfer the survey to ACAD format. (Make it digital)... Even if your only doing the front at this stage its good to have the existing interiors drawn up so you can use them later. When your architect has drawn up the front of the house, please feel free to send it to me and I'll have a tinker to see if I can fine tune it for you. You can contact me through www.angel-martin.com......(No charge, I just want you to get the very best out of the frontage, its a beautiful house, it deserves the attention) With regards to the interior, one bit of advise.... Design "all" the interior layouts at the same time even if you will be doing each room stage by stage. If you do them individually the design will be fragmented. By designing everything you create a synergy between the areas, a "battle plan" if you like that will prompt where you could start and the direction you need to take. Wishing you well.... Martin

If you haven't used that as a dining room in a year, do you actually need it? Might it be better to use the room as a TV room, or best sitting room for guests - keeping back living room for day to day living. Something you can turn into a dining room when you need it. I recently did this with a through lounge. When I had 13 people for lunch recently, was able to assemble a great dining room from furniture around the house and in my garage - worked perfectly for the day, then all went back again. Unused formal spaces really trouble me. You pay for the whole house, why not use it? If you do want a dining space, I would do some great shelving and built ins (with lighting) in the alcoves to store and display dinner wear / nice glasses etc. Then either go bigger with a great dining table and chairs - or go for an antique drop leaf that can fit in that nice window bay with a lovely plant on it and get pulled out when needed. Center the sofa on the long wall opposite fireplace, and get two occasional chairs that are right height to work as head/foot of table carvers when it's used as a dining room. Then you only need to have four folding chairs stored somewhere in house for use when you have a dinner party. Banish the beige with a great feature wallpaper on chimney breast with mirror - then pick out a colour to tone in the rest of the walls and add a selection of art/curios to make a picture wall either behind couch or on wall by kitchen. Need something at windows too - shutters if you can run to it ....or curtains. Just a pop of interest. Personally I like the floor - but you defo need to rethink the lighting. I'd do dimmable pot lights on ceiling that you can control separately to set mood in the room depending on how you use it. That pls lighting in alcove shelving plus a lamp on an end table by the couch or between the arm chairs - you'd have a room with lots of options. Good luck.

😂oh my goodness! We’ve spent a fortune in sample pots! Lots of Little greene, mylands… all the greens in the world! Your tiles is gorgeous!!! Because it’s quite bold, I feel it would need to have a bold, dark colour on the wall to bring everything together! Even if a darkish hallway, it does work 👍🏻. We were set on Calke green until someone on instagram mentioned about green smoke. We’ve got a sample pot and that was it! OH fell in love with it! 🤷🏻‍♀️😂👍🏻