The Rooms That Become the Most Loved

Expert

1 May

A small room at home

There is a small room in our family house that I almost gave up on. It had no obvious purpose, awkward proportions, not enough light, and for years it sat as the kind of room you walk past without quite noticing — the door usually closed, the contents some combination of leftover furniture and things waiting to be sorted on a weekend that never came.

Today it is the room my daughters fight over. It has become our family's evening sanctuary. Two walls are covered in chocolate-brown joinery; the rest is finished in a matching fabric wallcovering printed with Hollywood stars. The ceiling and all the woodwork have been gloss-painted to match, so the whole room reads as one continuous, enveloping surface. There are mohair blankets, sheepskin beanbags, a small bar, and a deep sofa that pulls out into a bed — which is the reason it has become my daughters' preferred location for sleepovers, movie marathons, and the obligatory midnight feast.

It is not a large room. It does not need to be. It is the room of the house that holds the most memory, and most evenings it is the room someone is in.

That experience changed how I think about overlooked rooms in clients' homes. I have walked into magnificent penthouses, chalet hideaways, and sunlit coastal homes and almost without fail there is one room in each of them that has been written off — the door kept closed when guests arrive, the dumping ground for seasonal clothes and the boxes someone is definitely going to sort this weekend. These neglected spaces, I have come to believe, are the greatest untapped opportunities in any home. Approached with attention, they often become the rooms a family loves most.

There is a counter-intuitive logic to this. The constraints of an awkward room — the wrong proportions, the missing light, the structural quirks that can't be moved — force a level of design attention that easier rooms simply never receive. Constrained rooms cannot get away with being adequate. They have to be conceived, not just decorated. And the cumulative effect of solving for every centimetre, every angle, every shadow, is a room that feels deeply considered in a way larger rooms rarely do.

Three projects have taught me this most clearly.

A teenage bedroom rebuilt from the bricks

The first was a teenage bedroom in a London townhouse, built around a kinked fireplace wall that the previous owners had tried and failed to ignore. The brief from the family was for a proper room rather than a workaround — somewhere their child could grow into, work in, sleep in, and bring friends to without apologising for the architecture.

The original plan was to remove the fireplace shaft entirely. That proved structurally impossible, and we had to re-conceive everything from there. We stripped the room back to the brickwork, which gained us a few centimetres here and there. We moved the doorway to sit opposite the window, which rebalanced the flow of the space — it had been fighting itself before, the door pulling the eye one way while the only source of natural light pulled it another. And we designed bespoke joinery in 3D to use every inch of the awkward walls — the kinked face of the fireplace included.

The room emerged as one of the most resolved in the house. The structural quirk that we had spent weeks trying to remove ended up giving the room its character. It is now, the family tells us, their teenager's favourite room — and the room their teenager's friends always want to be in.

I have come to think this is the lesson of every difficult room. The constraint that you cannot move is the constraint that gives the room its identity. Trying to design it out leaves you with a generic space. Designing into it leaves you with somewhere extraordinary.

A snug carved out of the rock

The second was in an Alpine chalet where the family wanted somewhere to retreat to in the evenings — somewhere dark, contained, and quiet, where the conversation could slow down and the day could settle. We had no obvious room to give them. The existing rooms were too bright, too open, or too connected to the circulation routes of the house.

The solution was to expand the property into the rock behind it. We carved out a new space, low and contained, with no natural light at all — and rather than fighting that, we leaned into it. The room is dark, materially rich, and cocooning. It doubles as a gym and massage room, with the equipment integrated into the joinery so the room can shift function without shifting character.

The lack of light, which would have been a flaw in any other room, is the reason this one works. Evenings inside it feel like an entirely different register from the rest of the house. The owners describe it as the room that decompresses them — the one they retreat to first when they arrive at the chalet, and the one they leave last.

I have learned, over years of designing for low-light rooms, to resist the instinct to brighten them artificially. Dark, saturated tones — deep reds, midnight blues, rich chocolate, forest green — are not a compensation for the missing light. They are the point of the room. Light becomes softer and more atmospheric, and the room begins to envelop you rather than apologise for itself.

A void turned into a dressing room

The third was in a Canary Wharf residence, where an unused void with a too-tall corner sat in the middle of the apartment doing nothing for anyone. It was the kind of architectural leftover that most people learn to live around — the wrong shape for furniture, the wrong proportions for any obvious function, but too sizeable to ignore.

We turned it into a dressing room. Bespoke cabinetry rises seamlessly to the eaves, accessed by a discreet sliding ladder — a quiet moment of craftsmanship that turns the impractical height of the room into the feature that makes it work. Floor-to-ceiling mirror panels along one wall doubled the perceived size of the space and let the shifting light from a single window dance across the room throughout the day. What had been an awkward volume nobody knew what to do with became the most quietly luxurious room in the apartment.

The owners now begin and end every day in it. The room they had previously regarded as a problem turned out to be the room that organises the rhythm of their lives.

What constrained rooms understand

The thread that runs through all three of these — and through our own movie room at home — is that the constraint is the gift. The kinked fireplace wall, the absence of light, the awkward void that no furniture would fit into: these are the conditions that force a room to be rethought from its bones outward, and the rethinking is what gives the room its character.

A larger, easier room can be furnished. A constrained room has to be designed. And designed rooms, I have found again and again, are the rooms that families love most — because every centimetre has been considered, every quirk integrated, every potential frustration turned into a feature. There is nothing accidental about the way they work, which is why they feel so resolved to be in.

The forgotten room is rarely forgotten because it cannot be made beautiful. It is forgotten because nobody has yet found the courage to redesign it from its bones outward. When that finally happens, it almost always becomes the room nobody wants to leave.