My article about the east London home of designers, Magnus Pettersen and Ella Jones, was published in the Guardian Saturday magazine and online. It can be be read, in full here and there’s a sample below.

A Victorian terrace revamped
How two young designers, inspired by their travels, transformed a neglected house.

When Magnus Pettersen and Ella Jones visited Japan in September 2017, they were obsessed with the sliding paper walls and wooden partitions they saw everywhere, from Tokyo to Kyoto. These traditional panels have formed the basis of their major revamp of a run-down Victorian terrace, which they have filled with architectural details and finds from their travels.

The couple bought their house in east London last year: the converted loft, extended kitchen and big garden sold it for them, but years as a shared rental had left the interior neglected. Period features had been ripped out and the ground-floor layout was disjointed: an entrance hall led to an enlarged front room with a bathroom behind it, in the middle of the house. So they knocked through the internal walls, removing the bathroom, and an open-plan living area emerged. They wanted to lay concrete flooring throughout, so they dropped the floor level at the front to meet the kitchen, where there had been a step down. Adding a supporting beam meant moving the staircase. “It was quite rickety and unsafe, with really narrow steps,” Jones says. They fitted a sleek wooden staircase and painted the treads black.

The Japanese-style decorative panels divide this space – creating a screen by the front door where the former hallway stood and partially dividing the kitchen from the living area. The couple designed them from translucent reeded glass and sapele African hardwood, sourced from a local timber supplier. “We wanted the ground floor to feel cosy without removing its open-plan feel,” Jones says. “The glass allows light to radiate through and the wood softens the space.”