Oslo Designer Shows Off Her Incredible Apartment Restoration

Hi Luxury Home Show, my name is Emilia and this is my home in Oslo, Norway. Come on in. When we bought this place this was the living room and the entrance for this room was actually behind where the oven is now and when we remade the floor plan we wanted to have a central kitchen that was kind of the heart of the home where it would be easy to host and cook and then also entertain. So this is one of my favorite rooms and one of the rooms where we restored a bunch of the classical details in the home. So as you see in the ceilings the ceiling height is quite tall which is so nice it gets like an airy good feeling in here and when we made the kitchen we actually took down some of the original molding and then hid some of the cabinetry inside of the walls and then restored it back on here. So when we bought the home it was in pretty poor condition it hadn't been restored or really been taken care of for a long time so we had to do some restoration of the original moldings and the ceilings to kind of give back that old feeling that this room had. We also found when we were doing the demo the doors into this room were hidden inside of the wall so it's probably been gone for 120 years and when we opened it up we could restore them which kind of gave this room back its original floor plan that's why it's one of my favorite rooms. And in terms of the actual kitchen itself I wanted something that was light and then that we could have some stone in here that had a little bit more dramatic veins and a little bit more color. When we go through you'll see some of the arches that we have in our home this is one of my favorites. When we knew that we wanted to hide some of the cabinets inside the wall we also knew that we could build this archway that would take up some of that space and the original entrance to this room is behind this wall as well so it's absolutely one of my favorite rooms. And I think for anyone designing a home it's important to focus on the feeling that you get and one of the biggest things that I think about is flooring and material use. So in this home we have oak wood floors and I'm the crazy person like in a showroom I'll take my shoes off I'll take my socks off and I'll like walk on the floor to feel it because I think homes evoke a sense of feeling you want to kind of touch the materials and the textiles and kind of what makes a home holistic is like the mix of materials. So here we've used a lot of ash and oak throughout the flooring and we've used a lot of the same type of stoneware and ceramic tiles and then we've kind of continued the same brassware or finishes for all the sinks and the taps in all the rooms just to kind of continue the same surface and the same material in every room. That's a great tip if you're wanting to find kind of a red thread throughout your home try to repeat materials and use kind of the same overall finishes in every room you can of course have variations but use this kind of the same and then for a kitchen the bathroom do from doing light ash or oak as we have here do that and repeat it in the bathroom so that it's it can be sisters or cousins but it should be related. We've been living here for a year and a half. We did purchase the home two years ago and we did the renovations quite suddenly. We were filming a tv show at the time and we had a 10-day takeover from the moment we bought the home to when we started renovations which typically is not how it goes. Usually you have at least three months just to make all the preparations so the renovation process took a little bit longer because we needed to wait for materials to get in and everything but we were renovating for five six months and have lived here for a year and a half. I started my career working in the banking and financing world so I don't really have an interior design degree as my original education. I did that after I've already been working for a few years but it's a very creative field and it's very fun to be able to play with all the mix of materials and different textures and color and especially in your own home. I think my overall style and aesthetic is definitely classic but I like to mix materials. I think a lot about how a home feels. I want it to be colorful and personal so it's a mix of many different styles. So how does doing interiors compare to, you know, the job in the finance world? I think my job today is very different than the job that I had previously. I think it's very flexible. Every day is different and I really love that clients trust us in order to design their homes or offices, hotels, restaurants. It's very creative so it's a big difference. Okay so one of my favorite places in my home is this little bar right here. I wish it was bigger. I wish there was a sink here and a fridge. There isn't because of space restrictions but this is my coffee station. This is where we typically start the day. We make a coffee or a matcha and yeah I like to have a lot of different ceramics from all over the world. So here's a little collection of my favorite things. These are some antiques from many places but mostly Japan and yeah some homemade pieces, some thrifted art and cookbooks. So before we move into the next room I wanted to show you this piece. I think sometimes I find stuff in the thrift shop or at an antiques market or that's been used before and I really love it. This art piece was super inexpensive and I've just always loved it. I think combining original maybe large-scale oil paintings and original art with thrifted finds it's kind of what curates the aesthetic or like your home. You don't have to have everything that's expensive or it's brand new or you know that's designer or anything like that. You can really just combine things and mix materials and finding original old art is one of my favorite things to do. So how much did it cost? I think it was like $80 or something like that. I mean even the frame that's like $80. I think that's nice that's a good find. I also have some pretty large-scale photos. I want to always decorate with the intention of conversation as being like the leading kind of floor plan guider. I think a lot of people when they design a home they think about oh my god like where am I going to have my tv? And we try to make it focused about conversation having people over versus where the tv is. So for the central piece here I wanted it to be an art piece. This is by a Norwegian artist called Laus Gangdal and I fell in love with this piece. He made it for us and I love it. It's a lot of colors and I think if you're kind of curious about having color in your home I think a lot of people have more neutral homes. Art is a great way to incorporate color and you can have loads of color without it being super kind of overpowering but for scale it's pretty big. This is actually a bookshelf that we made from Ikea kitchen cabinets and Billy bookcases. So in our previous home we had a quote to make a custom kind of bookshelf and it was like twenty thousand dollars I think and so we figured out we could do it ourselves and we did and so we did it again. And it's a great way to have storage and to have a nice way to show all your like weird items. Weird items? What weird items have we got? I think I've taken away some of my weird items. So I have a lot of things that I have inherited. This is a bowl that my grandfather made. He has a little wood workshop so I have a lot of his pieces that we've either made together or that he's made and then my grandmother, my late grandmother, she was probably the one person that I know that had the most random and extra and extravagant things and so from her I have a lot of like cool little trinkets that I don't know if they fit but they fit in here I think. So the sofa we've had I think this is the third apartment we have it in. So we've had it for a while. It's a modular sofa which I think is a great tip if you are wanting to kind of refresh your home and instead of having to buy something new you can buy something that's modular so it's easier for kind of differences of use. So we've had it styled as like a half circle, as a circle, we've done it as more of a modular where we use it in different rooms and I think one of the biggest tips I would do is a lot of people push their furniture like into the walls to make the room seem big and although it seems kind of like counter-intuitive pulling the furniture into the room makes the room feel bigger and it's also a great way to kind of center around conversation and being able to host versus having you know the furniture pushed very to the side and then place the tv in kind of the front and center aspect. So we've decided now and I change it a lot now it's in two pieces and then to have more like comfy seating on each side. Sometimes we have little ottomans or other chairs here for more seating options and this table is actually leftover tile from our like our bathroom a few apartments ago and we made it into this table. Awesome. This is a great way to reuse your tile. Now tell me about the fireplace in the corner because I keep noticing this. I've only ever seen one of these before and it was also in Norway. It is an old Swedish kakelom. It is a great fireplace obviously it's very grand but it's a historical type of fireplace that recycles heat and so it keeps the apartment hot for about 24 hours so it's great. Now I know you mentioned about how you know you don't design with the tv in mind but I am noticing you've got a very aesthetic looking tv there is a tv here so this was like out of the floor plans that we were discussing the most the hardest part was figuring out like where to do the tv and so it was actually my little sister that figured out because we're like how can we do it like it's going to be like hard to watch if it's you know so far away and he's like you just do like a hidden arm in the back and we're like thank you we've been spending months thinking about what to do so you can pull it out and kind of change it into so it goes out to about here and that ended up being like the best way so it's hidden and it is a samsung frame so you can switch out the artwork for whatever you want you can do original pieces you can do your own photos or here a monk painting perfect solution yes shout out little sister absolutely shout out to my sister for thinking about the the arm in the back and the tv is also something we've had for a long time I think buying a tv it's one of the hardest pieces to like hide and design so I really love this solution because it's yeah it's more aesthetic okay so now we're gonna go back to the kitchen and into the bedroom this was a living and then when we redid the floor plan we wanted to have the bedroom this way and I think sometimes when you're working with floor plans it's very easy to think okay whenever you open the door you want to have the bed right there and have the symmetry we actually built it more like a hotel room so we built kind of a freestanding wall here and then you're able to have a walk-in closet but being kind of hidden so it's not you know very exposed and it's not in a separate room which is practical so we also wanted to keep kind of two entrances as you would in a hotel room you have one entrance here and it connects to the other side here so that was one of the things that we wanted to do just to keep a good flow it's a big room so you have space to do it and I think when you're just finding a home sometimes you think like you have to follow like very strict rules I take a lot of design inspiration from hotels because they do a kind of different room design and different floor plans so that's definitely one of the little tricks that I use from a typical hotel room one of my favorite paintings in our apartment is this piece right here it's the same artist actually that painted the one in the living room but this is a collaborative piece with another Norwegian artist called Ragnhild Næss and this piece is actually on loan to us because it isn't for sale this is a piece that they painted and actually fell in love together when they painted this so they very sweetly said that this is a piece they want to keep for their kids so we are very happy to be the stewards of this piece as long as we get to have it it's beautiful it's very colorful it's a great way to wake up you have the view outside here and you can have a lot of sunlight and then you also have a lot of color here and then it was a coincidence but the ceiling height or the ceiling color in here matches with this pretty well so I think it's overall colorful but still neutral so I think if you keep art colorful you can also have a neutral base without it becoming too beige so that's a good tip the guy that works with us on restorations he said that he didn't think there was more than like two pieces of or two strokes of paint in the ceiling since the time this building was made which is crazy to think about but all the ceilings are original when we took over this place the guy we bought it from had lived here for 50 years and he had been smoking quite a bit and so when we were restoring it there was like nicotine popping out of the walls like the smell was insane like it was yellow and it was stinky so don't smoke and also yeah it sticks into your wall and ceilings and crown moldings so it was quite the process to to get it back to its original state so now we're in the bathroom this is actually probably one of the floor plans that was the hardest to figure out because this used to be the kitchen before and the room next to us is now a guest room that was the rest of the kitchen and when we kind of redesigned it we wanted the both rooms to feel spacious and I wanted to take some of the space from the room next to it to just hide all of the cabinets within the wall because when you do these wall mounted taps you have to have the battery inside the wall and if you're already going to have it inside the wall you might as well make an arch was my thinking so we made arches we hid the cabinetry we did kind of built-in taps for both the bathtub and also the sinks so if it's something that you're thinking about having wall mounted taps you can also use that space for storage so here we wanted it to be seamless and you can recognize some of the same materials that we've used throughout same as the the tile in here is the same as the kitchen counter and then the taps have the same surface level as the ones in the kitchen as well so if you're thinking about designing a space think about repetition it doesn't have to be exactly the same but as many times as you repeat kind of patterns materials color ways and surface levels the more cohesive it will seem so that was the big thing here i also wanted to incorporate some vintage lighting and a mix of material i think a lot of people are scared to use more than one tile in the bathroom here i think we have three four something like that as long as they have kind of the same color palette the same undertone don't be scared to mix and match it's kind of what makes a space feel cohesive so coming out of the bathroom we're in the hallway this room we've done quite a lot in we actually removed the lowered ceilings in here and got i think 60 or 70 centimeters more of ceiling height and then we've put in the same type of moldings that is original in other places of the apartment in here and then also laid some italian marble in the hallway that i love and then continued these like taller kind of floor lists there's also a powder room in the hallway this is a fun room because all of the materials inside this room we actually repurposed from one of the leftovers of our previous bathroom so both this wall right here with the tree 3d tile and as you probably recognize the same tile here as well so we got to kind of use some of the leftover stuff for a powder room it's not that much you need so it's a fun way to experiment a little bit or to use a fun tile or a nice color so tell us what's what's behind the door behind you okay right now it's nothing it's not a fake door but there is a two entrances to this apartment this is the back door and it leads to the loft which hopefully we'll be able to extend the apartment and buy an area of the loft get a staircase and build a second floor to this apartment that is our kind of current working plan and then perhaps build a terrace so you can see the ocean wow the sun well if you manage to succeed i might have to come back and see that i hope so i really hope so and also here you can see this is a door into what was previously a bedroom but we wanted to make this a focal point and also i had leftover tiles so when you have leftover tile you build a table or you build this search way and this is i really like it i think it's a little bit unusual but again something that you see maybe in receptions or hotels lobbies and it's a great way to find like inspiration for your home find stuff that you like in a restaurant and make your home feel a little bit more like that so it's a good tip if you have leftover tile you can tile it so now we're in the guest bedroom so we have some extra storage here but also is the place for our guests when they come stay this is a green room we have some green details in the bedding now too so that's nice has some green artwork but it's usually a place for family and friends come to stay it's very important for us both to have a guest room and perhaps if we end up purchasing the loft above us this will be a staircase but then we'll have more guest bedrooms upstairs if we're able to build it i hope you enjoyed the tour of our home if you'd like to see more you can follow me on instagram my tag is homewithmila on both tiktok and instagram i show my home my interior design project and yeah i'll see you there bye hi luxury home show i'm millie tanner an interior designer welcome to our project in the cotswolds come on welcome inside we started this project in 2022