Name: Mirka & Iain
Location: London
Rent or own: Own
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Mirka McNeill is a Polish-born former web designer and interior design student who has recently renovated the Victorian house she shares with her husband Iain in Barnes, a picturesque neighborhood in South West London. "My passion is to adapt historic buildings or interiors into a contemporary living space with respect to its past and history," Mirka says. "I have redesigned the space (on a tight budget) to create a contemporary living in a handsome Victorian house which has got a lot of original features like cornices, moldings, marble fireplaces, original doors and windows, an an antique pine floor throughout. To achieve unity of style with the architecture of the building and create a modern living space, I have used a fusion of contemporary and traditional styles."
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Mirka painted walls in a warm gray-beige (Stone 4 and 5 from the Paint & Paper Library), which created a neutral canvas for dark chocolate teak furniture (apart from the antique pine kitchen). She used Corallo wallpaper by Fornasetti for Cole & Son in the double living rooms -- which are separated by doors and a have different floor levels -- to give them a sense of unity. "I love the wallpaper so much that I have used it throughout the house in different color versions," Mirka says (see the kitchen and bedroom). Her color inspiration in the living room was the marble fireplace with browns, reds, blacks, beiges and whites. She added a light beige linen sofa, a teak bench, an antique French cage cristal chandelier, a Charles Eames armchair, glass cube tables and a cow skin rug. Ritual Chinese jewelry framed in traditional silvered wooden frames hang on the walls.
In the master bedroom, she added a king-size reclaimed teak bed from Lombok and hung a magenta/mauve neon chandelier. "It's a neon chandelier in the shape of a classic crystal chandelier - traditional form trapped in an ultra modern material," Mirka says. "It was quite risky to introduce the neon to the interiors, but in fact the light is magic and people's complexions look good in this light." She added chocolate teak furniture to keep the bedroom from being too feminine, and experimented by adding silver leaf to cover the wall above the fireplace instead of a traditional mirror.
Mirka papered the wall of the guest room with Red Flowers wallpaper from Cole & Son, where she has also installed a Moroccan lantern to hang from an antique ceiling rose and used solid oak plantation screens in front of the windows to filter light. She plans to add a Japanese-style black lacquered bed. The bathroom was inspired by "a lavish colonial style which I really admired in fantastic houses in Merida in Yucatan, Mexico," Mirka says.
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"The kitchen is the focus of the home," says Mirka. To update the kitchen without spending a fortune, she painted the pine units, which were partly painted red and green, the same color as the walls and used a mix of liming and natural wax to give them a sheen. "The multifunctional table is a massive old Indian piece which can be used as a dining table, a place to study, for reading or having a cup of coffee with your neighbor. The pine bench is my design upholstered with a cow skin with white and beige giraffe pattern (very very comfy!)." The room has French doors that lead to a lovely calm English garden.
Mirka added Corallo wallpaper in a light beige-grey with black, silver, gold and red branches to complement the blond wood of the kitchen and highlighted the original ceiling cornices with LED wire that demonstrate her flair for combining old and new.
To see more of Mirka's work, go here.
- Kristin Hohenadel blogging from rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, France. If you have an idea for a European house tour, please write kristinh @ apartmenttherapy . com
I bailed on the pictures, even though they look interesting. The slideshow doesn't work and the new format is annoying. Too much clicking and scrolling :(
view smile's profile
Same here :-(
view nadyamadrid's profile
Yes, annoying...
view ccs's profile
what a lovely and unexpected use of natural and artificial light. i really enjoyed the whole tour. then i realized that this designer's work was posted before and that i was equally amazed at the time by her work in other spaces.
thank you!
view *iris*'s profile
the new tour format isn't great, but it's not totally unusuable either. to work around the ads and scrolling, i click on see all thumbnails. after you click on the first photo just hit the next button or space bar to go through the album. it's really not that bad.
view *iris*'s profile
Iris, I have to respectfully disagree. On my mac with a 1280X 800 display, I have to scroll down to see the whole picture. When I go to the next picture I have to scroll my display every time. I remember Maxwell mentioning that a new format is coming soon--I eagerly await that, b/c this format is not usable.
view deneph's profile
or you can click on the photo itself to move to the next photo...
as for house tour, fantastic and so many great ideas!
view k in ditmas's profile
Wow! What a beautiful place!
view sissaphus's profile
like the use of the same wallpaper in different colorways...
view Lady J's profile
lovely but having just moved from london i can't begin to understand how this was done om a tight budget.
view sherry2's profile
I didn't really like this house tour. I DO like the darkest version of the wallpaper, shown in the top image. But I didn't like the wallpaper being used again and again, too much of a good thing. As though they found it at some clearance place and bought it all and then later decided to spread it all over the house.
And the darkness of the wallpaper in the top photo, as well as the mix of styles, it doesn't work for me. I don't know where to look. It's too busy. Not in a good way (for me, my opinion).
It's like everything is vying for attention, and not quietly.
"LOOK AT ME" screams the wallpaper!
"OVER HERE" says the giant lampshade!
The bookshelf appears to be blocked by something that a lamp is on and the white sofa wedged into the window niche.
Can't stand the neon stuff.
Love the Moroccan lamp, and have loved it since The Sims 2. But did they get those at the same house of clearance stuff and use them all over too?
Bedroom:
http://gallery.apartmenttherapy.com/photo/052508mirkahousetour/mirka27
A room with a sofa:
http://gallery.apartmenttherapy.com/photo/052508mirkahousetour/mirka6
I like the bedroom one much better.
The wallpaper and lamps being used repetitively reminds me of the complaints folks have around the Small, Cool contest. Whereby it appears that everything came from one source. Whether it's IKEA or DWR, when it looks like it was directly ordered all at once, it doesn't have the same impact as collections of interesting things.
This home DOES have plenty of interesting things, but the wallpaper repeated bothers me. And there are so many BIG wallpaper patterns. Besides the trees, there are TWO kinds of giant flowers.
The bathroom tile grout looks absolutely filthy. Reminds me of when I first discovered broomstick skirts, and my mum wanted to iron them. Because they were so wrinkled. Ha!
This could well be the same thing, that the grout is SUPPOSED to be dark and the tiles light. But I swear, if my mum was still alive, she would try to bleach out that grout!
Yeah, I'm going to pick a nit too, I LOVE this image:
http://gallery.apartmenttherapy.com/photo/052508mirkahousetour/mirka24
Except for the terracotta pot on the right side.
That image is so serene and peaceful.
And I would be out there a lot, after running screaming from the house with visual overload. It's loud. The house is loud. Like standing next to a speaker fifteen feet tall at a live concert and having my head implode.
I like the kinds of places, I guess, that are like music on the wind.
Where I have to strain to hear the sound, where I WANT to investigate the source.
view TRUE BLUE's profile
This place is like a dream. And in total contravention of previous commenters, it looks to me like you worked very hard to find all of these elements. And it comes together flawlessly.
view MarieE123's profile
The kitchen is amazing. The yard is gorgeous. The neon is awful. The photos look vandalized by the neon.
I also agree that the wallpaper, at times, is a bit much.
view RobertTheChicken's profile
Slideshow is a waste of time & effort.
I can't advance the photos manually without getting a blank screen, hit "back" then hit the "Next" button again - Totally annoying. (Using IE)
view bepsf's profile
"vandalized by neon"
Ha ha, that's rich.
That apartment is a whole lot of ugly.
view MiklakMiklak's profile
apartment is perfect. will owner adopt me?
view jennifers's profile
They even have the twisty wood stool as lamp in the living area and the bedroom. Again, it reminds me of an "everything must go" clearance sale where the deals are too good to pass by, and so you buy a bunch of the same thing.
Best quote from the text:
======
In the master bedroom, she added a king-size reclaimed teak bed from Lombok and hung a magenta/mauve neon chandelier. "It's a neon chandelier in the shape of a classic crystal chandelier - traditional form trapped in an ultra modern material," Mirka says. "It was quite risky to introduce the neon to the interiors, but in fact the light is magic and people's complexions look good in this light."
======
OK. How many people ARE in that master bedroom at any one time to have their complexions flattered? ;)
view TRUE BLUE's profile
UGLY, AWFUL...
TERRIBLE !!!
view Ziiip®'s profile
Actually like the repeated wallpaper--changing colorways but not designs makes it somehow more soothing to me than wallpaper usually is--but the neon? Seriously, wtf? It's almost masochistic. Why hurt a nice home?
view luckypeach's profile
Wow, I'm so into this house. That neon chandelier is great, even if it's in the bedroom. (It's where you have FUN, not just sleep!) The living room is so cozy. I love using the color black, I just don't know if I could be so brave using it as a main color like that. Beautiful.
view crash's profile
I am sorry but this is a poor renovation job.
Little thought has gone into the original features of the building and it certainly isn't what i would call contemporary.
The blinds are completely wrong, which is sad as they are quite easy to replace (if they aren't already there but painted shut) with shutters painted white.
The morrocan type lapshade looks cheap and nasty and out of place, the tiles in the bathroom look old and worn out, and the grouting is disgusting.
The neon light could have worked if it was the main feature in the room, but instead it had to complete with some very loud wall paper.
The whole effect just looks cluttered, cheap and tacky not cool, sophisticated and modern.
view Miss Match's profile
If you look at other work she's done on her website, you'll see she's got quite an eye. It's not my style but I can appreciate her style -- quite sophisticated, good color sense and daring. Tops a lot of the "designers" you see in magazines today -- clutter without taste. Could live without the wallpaper and would like to see a little more breathing room. But kudos for originality combined with good taste.
view matthieu's profile
I love the neon chandelier; anybody know where to get it?
view theora55's profile