Romantically undone or laid back luxury?

How the Garden Room might have been a very different sort of room

Behind the dusty, old blue-green toile de jouy style fabric we were pulling off the walls, we found a beautiful patch of jade. A mottled, deep green swatch of paint right above the fire place, behind the huge gilt framed mirror. Perhaps the whole room was once this colour? Maybe someone was planning to be brave, but in the end decided against paint in favour of the fabric? Or perhaps it might have been a sort of accent colour? We had no idea how it had come to be there, but I knew I was in love with it. It was dark in some places, lighter in others, painterly brush strokes clearly showing, a hasty job perhaps? The sort of finish that looks beautiful in photographs, rougher in real life. There were brown paper tears at the edges, as if someone had stuck strips of paper packing tape around the colour to make a frame. Parts of it were torn away, jagged edges adding to its charm. The gold of the mirror against the green made me stop and stare each time it caught my eye.

I loved the fabric we were tearing down too, in fact I still have it, neatly folded in a pile under my bed. But it was only half a job. A patch of the room had been left bare, another area covered in blue vinyl to stop splashes from a now defunct wash basin, ruining the weave.

The old bakerlite light switches and ancient electrics needed replacing. Occasionally when you flicked on a light in a dark room there would be a small but terrifying flash and crackle of electricity fizzing through the switch. I worried about the house burning to the ground. There was no escaping the fact that new electrics needed to be channeled into the walls because we didn’t want the quicker fix of surface mounted cables in plastic conduits, so the fabric had to come down, the battens holding it too.

Beneath the fabric, the plaster was mottled and chalky, a beautiful soft finish. As well as the patch of jade green we uncovered some elegantly wonky wooden panels above the doors to the hall and to a built-in cupboard all hidden away. Between the panels was a blank piece of wall neatly framed in wooden architrave painted in a soft, muddy green grey. I loved all of it. The wonkiness, the old colours, the chips and cracks, the mottled, textured plaster on the walls.

Everything about this room was what had made me fall in love with the house. The huge window that flooded the room with light, the creamy yellow stone tiles on the floor, the simple beauty of the panelling, the romantic undone-ness of it all. I wanted to just sweep the floors, wipe down the walls, make a bed up and leave it all as it was.