Inside Sophie Robinson s Colourful East Sussex Home

Hi Luxury Home Show, I'm Sophie Robinson, Interior Designer and welcome to my home here in East Sussex. Come and have a look inside. And this is where you get the full panoramic view of the garden, of the willow tree, of the woodland and you really get to enjoy the seasons all year round. It's cosy, it's cocooning, it's like a room giving you a really, really lovely warm hug. I just feel this real connection to the outdoors which is so important for me living here in this house. So we've lived in this house for 10 years, I live here with my son Arthur and my miniature English Bull Terrier Lucy and all I'm going to say is when we bought this house it did not look like this. Architecturally it's a bit of a mishmash, it's a couple of farm workers cottages sort of smushed together, then there's like a 1980s extension and a plastic conservatory stuck on the back. And it was not love at first sight, I did not love the house but I loved the location. The garden being surrounded by woodland, a beautiful pond, a gorgeous willow tree and I just knew that I could completely transform the house with the power of colour and pattern. Because architecturally it's not a beauty, there's nothing of real sort of importance, heritage importance in this house. It's not listed which in this part of Sussex is quite rare so I knew that I had the potential to completely reinvent it. So let's start in the heart of the home and that's the kitchen. So this has got to be my dream kitchen, I absolutely love this room and it's completely transformed the way I feel about living here. Now it wasn't always like this, when we bought the house this was actually a living room, it was a lovely huge living room but the kitchen was where the TV snuggers now which is really small with a view of the driveway and guess what, that's just where we spend all our time and when people come over I always have lots of family and friends over to the house. Everyone was crammed into this tiny kitchen and meanwhile my son would sit in here on his own watching YouTube and it just didn't feel like the right use of the space because as I said this is why we bought this house, it's for these views and so we'd always plan to do an extension, get rid of the plastic conservatory which I'd always hated and put a kitchen on there. But when it came to looking at quotes and the cost of it and the escalating price of developing property over the last few years, I sort of realised that it wasn't going to be a goer and then I got to thinking we don't actually need more space, we just need to use our space differently. So I kind of had this light bulb moment of actually just switching the two rooms over, bringing the kitchen into this really, you know this is like eight metres by five and a half metres this space and putting the TV snug into the room which is like four metres by three and a half metres. And as I said it's just completely transformed the house for an absolute fraction of the budget. So it wasn't a particularly complicated build, we'd already got say for example water and drainage here because I have a bathroom above so it was really easy to put dishwasher and sink in here. I had to spend a bit of money on an electrician to put the cooking island in and reconfigure the lighting. So actually in terms of the build it was pretty straightforward. So then that allowed me to start really getting creative with the interior design and the colour scheme here. Now when it comes to designing any room in my home or indeed for any project I always start by thinking about how I'm using the room and how I want to feel in the space. So this is our family space, this is the kitchen but it's also the dining room and it also bleeds through into the conservatory. So this is very much where gatherings happen, it's a busy, convivial, sociable space. So I wanted to have that feeling of happiness, of joy, of uplift, I wanted to have a really positive energy and I sort of know that yellow really delivers on that. So I was kind of leaning towards a sort of vibe and a general colour scheme. But I actually started with this wallpaper, this was my jumping off point for the whole scheme. This is a wallpaper that I designed with Harlequin. It's an archive print which I think works really beautifully with the sort of English country house feel because it's also acknowledging where I am here in English countryside. So to have an archive English floral is just really perfect for the house. And yet the colour palette feels quite fresh and joyful and uplifting. So it's a really good tip actually if you're ever struggling to think about how to build up a colour palette sometimes you can just find a whole colour palette in a print like this. So from here I pulled out the yellow which you'll see on the kitchen cabinets, also the soft pinks and then actually when it came to choosing the colour for this island there were lots of different options, I could have gone green, I could have gone blue but I actually really love this deep burgundy red, it brings a sense of kind of warmth and heart and I feel like it really grounds the space. Another way of sort of grounding really bright joyful colours is with really lovely organic natural materials. I mean I just absolutely love this sort of like original Ingle Nook fireplace. It's got the lovely oak beam, it's got the roaring wood burner again creating real heart and warmth at the centre of the home. But then also kind of spinning that out so I've got this like roughly hewn oak dining table. You know it's not perfect, I love the kind of waney edge. These sort of like oak chairs have got rush seating. It's these rustic sort of organic natural materials that I think create this real warm feeling of homeliness. With a busy kitchen like this I think it's really important to like balance storage. Absolutely love my larder cupboard, so everything gets hidden in there. And then rather than wall units I opted for open shelves which is just a really practical way of keeping things you need to grab regularly like I've got all my teas and coffees here. But it's also a really nice place to display personal things. Like I'm obsessed with ceramics and I have a huge collection of jugs and I just like to look at them every day, they just bring me joy. Now for a kitchen there is a lot of pattern in here. I mean I've gone for this wallpaper and I've just put it all the way around the room. There's pattern on the windows, there's pattern on the curtains. I've got a patterned rug on the floor and even pattern on the worktop. I remember when I was designing this kitchen with a kitchen designer they suggested putting a plain worktop with it and I was like no let's keep layering the pattern. And I just love the kind of playfulness of the florals with the stripes with this beautiful kind of like veiny marble. So I think if you're going to go for Maximus pattern matching and clashing you've just got to go for it and put the pattern everywhere. So before we finish up in this space I just want you to check out my little bar area. I think it's really good to try and use every inch of space. So I had this little unit custom made. It's got my little drinks corner. Keep all the glassware in here and it works really well especially in summer when the doors are open and we're having parties people can come and fix themselves a drink. Absolutely love it. And I love these curtains. These are made to measure from Harlequin especially for this window and I can't emphasise enough the importance of framing a view because it's all about the view to the garden and I just love this really graphic paper straw stripe. It looks really sharp against the kind of busy floral and when you stand back as I said it just brings all the focus and the attention to that view outside. So coming off the kitchen into the conservatory and this is where you get the full panoramic view of the garden of the willow tree of the woodland and you really get to enjoy the seasons all year round. But conservatories, this was just, I couldn't wait to knock this thing down. I mean it was shiny white plastic and I absolutely hated it. But then as I said when we realised we weren't going to be doing the extension I needed to get creative. I needed to make this horrible plastic conservatory work for me. So the first thing I did was to paint out all the plastic using an all surface primer. I picked a colour and it's this lovely kind of bluey green which for me is much softer and I love the way it kind of like disappears into the view. Then it was all about how to control the light in here. Anybody who's ever had a conservatory knows that they're way too hot in the summer. The sun overhead, you literally needed sunglasses to be in here. So I actually coated the whole of the roof with solar film which stops it from being so hot in here and then created these beautiful sails from our Harlequin wildflower meadow fabric which I think is just so soft and pretty and it diffuses the light so beautifully. This was really easy to do. The seams just came, she measured out the conservatory and then just created these panels which we've just hooked into the structure and I think it's just so super effective and again an absolute fraction of the price than knocking this down and building something else instead. And then really again going back to sort of my philosophy of like how you want to feel in a space. This is a room that is a daytime room. It's to be enjoyed mainly sort of spring and summer and so again just choosing the colours and the patterns that really bring this very pretty and light and this kind of celebration of nature. So you'll see there's lots and lots of different patterns all jostling next to one another. We've got stripes, we've got checks, we've got big florals, we've got little florals. So lots to delight the eye. Also working with some of the pieces I already had. Like this is a painting that I'm really fond of. This is one of my best friends. Becky Blair painted this and I definitely wanted to incorporate that into the scheme. So I looked at the palette that she'd used here all these lovely pink and aquas and greens and by then sort of bringing all the fabrics within that palette into it it's made it all hang together. So yes there's a lot going on here. There's a lot of different patterns but it's all sort of linked with this lovely kind of springtime colour palette which is why I think it works so well together. And a lot of the furniture in here I previously owned. I mean this wasn't a room that just popped up from scratch. This is a really old 1980s faux bois sideboard that was in the bedroom but I kind of love the like crazy Hansel and Gretel kind of carveness of it and again I think it just works really well in this sort of woodland country setting. A tip that I would give if you are doing like a redesign or a redecoration is not just to think you've got to throw everything out. This is actually quite an old sofa of mine that I chose to re-cover in a plain fabric. Look, come and have a look at this. This little piping detail here is our wildflower meadow floral which also links to the blinds above. It's just a really nice way of tying it together and it just makes the piece of furniture look quite bespoke. And then over here these are actually my grandmother's old cane furniture. They're in like a really day-to-day fabric. They're in really good condition, just re-covered them in this floral print which again kind of links with the whole pattern story. And it's a one-off and it's original. So now we're back in the hallway and all I'm going to say is I think the hallway is one of the most important rooms in your home to get right but they are so often overlooked. But if you think about it, it's like the first room that you pass through to get up and start your day. It's the room that greets you when you get in from the end of the day and it's also that first impression to anybody who's visiting your home. So it's got to feel right. Now for me, it was all about drenching this in colour because oh my goodness, this hallway was an absolute disaster when we bought the house. I'll paint the scene for you. It was like fitted brown carpet. This was covered in swirly Artex all over here. All these little beams were painted black so you had these like black stripes overhead. And then just to finish it off, this whole wall was covered in like 1980s kind of fake brick slips. It was really heavy, really oppressive, really brown and it was just not a great place to come home to. So actually, to kick things off, it was the first room in the whole house that we decorated and I just basically went for my favourite colour. I've always really loved this very sort of deep Lazuli, Colbert, Yves Klein blue. It just really gives me all the energy. I also knew that it was a colour that I was probably going to link to other rooms in the house because here's the thing, whatever you do in your hallway, it's almost like the spine of the house where everything else comes off it. You want to really make sure your hallway links to all the other spaces in your home. But on a practical level, it's also got to function. So I invested in some really clever fitted storage. This area here is where we keep all the boots and the coats and even like those tins of paint and things like that that never have a home. And then I actually utilise this space for shoe storage. I have to say it works. I have my son train. He comes in and the trainers go in the little cubby hole and it means we're just not tripping over loads of stuff. It might be like an unusual choice to go to something quite dark in a hallway that doesn't have a lot of natural light, but I sometimes think you've just got to kind of embrace the atmosphere. And what it does mean is that my love of brightly coloured art and objects really pop against this dark blue. I also love the way that this colour changes throughout the day. So in the morning it feels quite vibrant and bright and then come evening this blue sort of turns to a navy and this is where the lamps and the wall lights and things like that really create a lovely sense of atmosphere. Another great tip about painting a hallway a dark colour is it means as you move into other rooms in the house you get a heightened sense of light and space. So from the hallway into my home office. And here you can see clearly illustrated how I've taken that lovely rich Lazuli blue and brought it into this space. It's painted on the cabinetry and the woodwork. It's also in fabrics as well as some of the ornaments and details. And this is really how I make a maximalist interior work and hang together because there's a lot going on. There's a lot of colour, there's a lot of pattern, there's a lot of beautiful stuff. And this is how you make it feel coherent by repeating these similar patterns and sort of threading them through the house. It sort of takes the eye on a little bit of a journey. But the superstar in this room, I mean it has to be this wall mural. Isn't it just the most fabulous thing? So this was part of my collection with Harlequin. It's Flora in Harlequin Design Studio. It was inspired by the view from the window of the willow tree of the Woodland Beyond and so this is a sort of abstract interpretation of the view from this very office. I just think it looks amazing. The texture, the colour palette, and actually the texture of the wallpaper is like a canvas. It also means that it's really durable and really hardworking so it's super, super practical. The thing with murals, most people just put them on one wall which you can absolutely do, but I just thought it would be thrilling to wrap this painting all the way around the room so you're completely cloaked and immersed in this lovely kind of woodland colour palette and it just feels so good to be in here. It completely feeds my soul. I love it. So in terms of layout, I mean I'm lucky this is quite a nice big space so I put my desk in the middle of the room rather than pushing it up against the wall and this means obviously when I'm looking at my screen all day every time I look up I've got that lovely long view. It's just really good for you. It helps kind of lower stress. It lowers our blood pressure. Just looking at all that lovely daylight, all that lovely, lovely greenery. So I think that's really important to think about especially when you're working from home which so many of us are doing now is don't just push yourself up against the wall or into a dark corner. Make sure you sit and prioritise giving yourself the best aspect. So this is my creative space. It's really important that I've leaned into the colours that really make me feel inspired, that make me feel motivated, that also help me concentrate and I think this sort of lovely rich blue really does that. The other key thing is to make sure that all the unsightly clutter is hidden from view. So I invested in this wall-to-wall storage so you can see here I've got all my office supplies and swatches and samples and paint charts in here. I've even hidden a printer inside a cupboard because who wants to look at that big box of white plastic? And then over on this side of the room I've got this really nice draper's table and this includes all the projects that I'm working on at the moment. So for example, I create these sort of swatch trays. This is actually for a room I'm going to show you in a minute. But this sort of shows you how I would start building up a colour palette. Looking at paint colours and just checking that those tones work with all the different fabrics that I'm going to put together whether they're for sofas or cushions. Any flooring samples will also go in here. Any kind of like small accent fabrics will go in here. And it's just a really important way of building up that colour palette, that pattern palette with these swatches and samples to make sure the whole colour scheme sings before I go ahead and start ordering stuff. So before I take you to the last room on the ground floor check out the room that everybody asks to see. That is, of course, the downstairs loo and then into the TV snug. So this is the room that we as a family use in the evenings for watching TV. So I very much designed it with that mood and that purpose in mind. So yeah, it's cosy. It's cocooning. It's kind of like a sort of cosy cinema room which is why I've gone for this very, very dark colour drenched all over the walls, all over the ceiling all over the woodwork. So it's all about sort of, it's like a room giving you a really, really lovely warm hug. I love it. My mum absolutely hates it. She's so rude about this room. She thinks it's really cave-like and depressing. But when the lights are on in the evening we've got wall lights, we've got this lovely glow washing down those walls and I must admit, I absolutely love it. How I've made it work for me is first of all, had this sofa custom made. So this room is roughly four metres. I've got about two and a half metres here and I've had a sofa that wraps all the way around the room. So we've actually had ten people in here at Christmas watching Christmas movies. And then a footstool as well is a great idea if you want a few extra people joining in the corner or you can use it to put the popcorn on, put your feet up. So it's all about the minimal amount of furniture the maximum amount of seats, if you like. The colour palette was really inspired by Marrakesh. It's a city I go to a lot. I absolutely love going there to source items for projects but also just for that complete injection of colour. So this painting here is really, really special. This was painted by my best friend, Sophie Abbott and it's actually the sunset on the rooftop of our favourite hotel. But you've got all these lovely oranges and apricots and lilacs like when you really look at an African sunset it's a really, really beautiful colour palette so then you see that rolled out with all the fabrics and the objects that I've pulled together in here. When it comes to creating that really soft and cosy vibe texture is so important so I've actually chosen velvet fabrics for all the upholstery and all the cushions. This is the Wonderland floral which is the real showpiece of the whole collection but mixing that with stripes, with different florals really going for these lovely pink and orange tones as well to really add the warmth and then of course layering that on a lovely vintage woolen berber rag just makes it all feel so cosy. Alright, let's go upstairs. So onto the landing which is very much an extension of the hallway see all that lovely blue colour has been pulled upstairs, again I've drenched it all over all the work and doors. This is the room of doom you will not be having a look in here let's be honest, everybody has one. This is my bedroom in here, I'll show you that later but meanwhile again just thinking about how your home can kind of tell your story and actually collecting artwork is really, really important. Some of these pieces here I've owned for years ever since my first flat when I left out of home. What I love about a gallery wall like this is it can be quite organic you can add things as and when you wish maybe people are gifting you bits of artwork or you might pick something up in the art fair some of these pieces I've picked up in charity shops and I think as you build them they kind of tell your story there's a lot of sentimental attachment to some of these pieces and I just love the way they sing against this really dark colour. So as I take you down to this end of the house just note another Moroccan rug they are a little bit of a personal obsession let's go and have a look at the family bathroom when we bought the house, this bathroom was tiles floor to ceiling, all the way around the room, ceramic tiles on the floor it was so cold so clinical, so echoey absolutely hated it, never used it never had a bath in here, it was a total no go zone, and it was beige. So when it came to decorating this space, I kind of applied the same design philosophy as I would do a living room, I wanted to bring in all the character and all the softness and kind of all the cosiness, because this is a room just with a bath and a basin, the shower is separate and next door, so I wanted it to become a room where you would relax where you wanted to linger, where you felt warm and cosy so there isn't one ceramic tile in here anywhere it's a wood floor, which is a bit warmer and then I've actually wallpapered the room and used painted bathroom MDF panelling as a splashback, rather than tiles and as a result, acoustically it's a lot softer, but it just feels so much warmer and cosier and then it's all about adding all that lovely texture, so we've got the rattan wall lights, we've got plates and artwork on the walls, we've got a lovely kind of old vintage bamboo shelving and chair, and again I think that element of old furniture again, just sort of softens all the very kind of shiny taps and sanitary wear that you get in the bathroom this has been really successful I absolutely love this room now So this is the guest bedroom, and I've really taken quite a different decorating approach to this room it's, you may notice a lot sort of quieter and calmer in vibe, and this is due to the fact that I've used a much smaller colour palette, that is actually only mainly blue and white, with a little accent of this lovely sunny yellow and the colour saturation isn't so deep, there's a lot of white ground in this wallpaper, so the room sort of feels a bit more light and open and airy, which I felt was really nice for a guest bedroom, because while I love all the colour, all the pattern all at once, if you're somebody who likes to live with a bit less, this is the way to do it, quieter patterns and less colours, so let me show you this wallpaper, because while it appears quite quiet, when you get up close, the detail is absolutely breathtaking, again hand drawn in the Harlequin Design Studio it's almost like the flowers are growing out 3D from the wall, I absolutely love that it's a classic trellis pattern, which is quite a clever visual illusion, it sort of creates more depth as you almost see beyond the pattern, so it's ideal for small rooms, it can just help the room feel a little bit bigger I love to do really unexpected things with colour, and actually painting this window, this really sunny yellow has made a real feature of it in this room not something I would ordinarily want to do, because actually, these windows are plastic, UPVC and I absolutely hated them, again completely the wrong thing to have in a period house like this, but to rip them out and replace them was going to be super costly, so actually just painting them has completely disguised the fact they're plastic and well I think they look great, so this little shower room is a right little jewel box such a sort of tiny room, wasn't really big enough for a shower tray and a door, it was all just feeding to squeeze, so tanked it out, made it into a wet room and then just clad it out in those lovely buttery yellow tiles because this is a room that we use first thing in the morning, it's our get up and go room and nothing starts the day brighter than a lovely sunny yellow, and then popped in a pink loo and basin because why not, it's a talking point if nothing else, okay let me show you my bedroom, so this is my room and I've got it exactly how I want it, and of course that is full of all the colour and all the pattern because I know a lot of people want their bedrooms to be like really calming really trill, but I tell you what, I want to wake up and just feel the best most fabulous version of myself and this room definitely delivers on that it's a complete celebration of my love of creativity of pattern, of colour of maximalism, I mean just check this out, here for example you've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 patterns just in the bed alone and then there's even more patterns on the armchairs and the cushions and the artwork because I think it's all about really leaning into who you are what's your pattern personality how you want to feel in your own home I've leaned into this lovely palette of kind of like rich sort of cobalt blues and emerald greens they feel really luxurious to me they're also those colours of nature which I get to enjoy from the view outside the window and I think that's very much what inspired this wallpaper this is the Wonderland floral wallpaper it's another archive print that we've remodelled and recoloured in this very contemporary colour palette but I just love the way that there's real kind of like motion and movement in this wallpaper which sort of links to the view outside when the trees are like heavy with leaves and they're blowing in the wind. I just feel this real connection to the outdoors which is so important for me living here in this house. But come and have a look at it honestly because it's so special and the detail and the colour palette in this wallpaper is just extraordinary so yeah you've got all these lovely kind of like jewel bright colours but then you've got all these lovely kind of like burnt oranges and kind of like conker browns and again looking at the view outside my window as the seasons change and we get all those lovely auburns and russets of autumn sort of links really beautifully with the colour palette in here. When I was designing this collection with Harlequin I just wanted to give people a complete tool kit so they could be creative and playful and look if you want seven different patterns on your bed, if you want giant pom poms on your curtains, I give you full permission to go for it. Well thanks Luxury Home Show it's been an absolute pleasure showing you around my home and if you've loved any of the Harlequin wallpapers and fabrics we'll do check out the description below but otherwise hope to see you soon! Hi Luxury Home Show I'm Hannah Heemsburg and welcome to my Dorset farmhouse nestled in the countryside Something that you don't get in a new house are witch's marks it's something that you can't really purchase in a new house