The challenges we face when designing our own homes!

 This month we’re shining the spotlight on some of our residential projects and to kick it off Caroline from our team shared some inspiration and realities about her own recent home development.  

 “As a designer it’s really hard to design your own home because we’re always designing. We’re exposed to so many different ideas and inspirations, so picking one or two is really challenging.” Caroline, lead Interior Designer.

When approaching the project of the renovation of her own home Caroline faced the challenge of applying the years of inspiration to the complete re-design of her own North London home. Built in the 1930s with only one previous owner, Caroline truly had her work cut out for her.

Caroline and her husband Rob’s vision was to design a home that was homely, comfortable and infused with a little fun.

They each became very hands on with the project, both approaching the renovation from different angles. Caroline took on the creative, designing each room within the four-bedroom house. On the other hand, Rob, who is a heating engineer, took on the manual tasks, building the kitchen from scratch, plastering the walls and laying tiles amongst more.

One of the challenges they faced was the design of the extension they had added. They wanted to avoid it becoming a white box and to make sure that it had the same personality as the rest of the house, by creating a cohesive design. They tackled this by applying wood panels to the ceiling and creating a unique kitchen from scratch.

Their home renovation has become more of a passion project than a job for Caroline and Rob and something they have spent their weekends doing while their teenage son is off playing golf.

Disclaimer- please note that the images on the mood board do not belong to Tonik.