Name: Penny, Mark, Minnie & Charlie Leaver Green & cat Fynn
Location: Kingsdown — Bristol, UK
Size: 1500 square feet
Years lived in: 3 — owned
Textile artist Penny Leaver Green knows how to make the most of her historic 1850 home. She's graciously kept the many of the home's distinguished elements while adding a touch of sophistication. This looks like a fantastic home for Penny and her husband to raise their two children.
Penny & Mark's home looks like something out of a catalog. Each room is impecable and is styled perfectly. It looks exactly how I would hope a traditional English home to appear. Not only was this home built in 1850, it was also built in an area which is now designated for conservation. Because of this home's history and location, Penny is limited to what she can do structurally and aesthetically.
The home features a perfect array of vintage decor, with each room full of amazing historic pieces. Although the kitchen has been seriously revamped, it still has an understated quality in keeping with the other rooms in the home. Penny just finished work on her new studio space. It's a new build by John Tinney in the adjacent lot!
Apartment Therapy Survey:
Our Style: Eclectic, vintage, classic.
Inspiration: The world around me but also my parents' home.
Favorite Element: I love the ground floor of our home- it works practically and aesthetically while each room works with the next and you feel connected with people in different rooms, they each have a separate feel. I love the wallpaper in our sitting room it was a house warming present from my mother. Cole and Sons Humming birds.
Biggest Challenge: The kitchen is dark - we raised the ceiling and put in a large mirror which makes it brighter.
What Friends Say: They like the wallpaper and ask us who did our bookshelves!
Biggest Embarrassment: The chaos inside drawers and behind cupboard doors.
Proudest DIY: Turning a 1940s egg incubator into a piece of furniture to house a stereo- it fitted perfectly!
Biggest Indulgence: My studio in the garden- we never spend much on furniture or objects as we rarely have any spare cash and I feel a particular pride when I have managed to buy something really cheaply- I recently bought a cupboard for my fabric store for £15.
Best Advice: Buy what you like not what you think other people will like and try to edit/ change objects around periodically.
Dream Sources: Always an auction.
Resources of Note:
KITCHEN
- •Tiles: Made by my Mother
•Thank you cards from friends: mainly Joe Berger & Luis Cook
BEDROOM
- • Wallpaper: Farrow and Ball
• Slippers: Agent Provocateur
• Lamp: Flea market Paris
• Pictures on walls and dress on bed: Penny Leaver Green
SITTING ROOM
- • Wallpaper: Cole and Son
• Dolls house: made by my Mother
• Library steps: Ebay
• Shelves: made by excellent local craftsman
CONSERVATORY
- • Lotus pedal car: Auction
• Tonka toys various: Ebay
• Cinema seats: Reclamation yard
• Ladybird books: Charity shops
BATHROOM
- • Enamel sign: Auction
• Ebony mirrors: would like a collection- £5 from e bay and carboot sale
• Bathtub: £350 reclamation yard - re enameled in situ £320
• Wall paper: Cole and Son
• Book: first edition of The Portrait of a Tortoise - Gilbert White naturalist
• Doll: Car boot
• Star fish: Beach Norfolk
STUDIO
- • Card file: Made by a friend
• Fabric Cabinet: From a chocolate factory
• Chairs: From a dump
• Enamel sign: Auction
Thanks, Penny & Mark!
Images: James Balston
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My new favorite.
wow. just lovely. Thanks.
Wow, this has to be one of my favorite house tours! They did a really great job and I love the wallpaper spaced throughout the house.
wow.
- can I move in?
I want to move in with you. Beautiful!
Want. The. Garden.
Aside from that - I echo jmarsh - lovely. So charming and so full of character. It's also so great to read that they don't spend a lot to achieve such a fantastic home.
This is so lovely, charming indeed. The light is so beautiful throughout. It has that just perfectly worn lived in feeling. The park like setting back area is beautiful.
Speechless, here.
Awesome. Really, really, awesome.
um, yes, please.
the space is airy and well laid-out, and i absolutely love the studio, especially the card file! however, the only wallpaper i liked was the trees. the rest of it seemed pretty "granny" to me. also, not a huge fan of the artwork.
Is the wall of bookshelves built around a closed chimney breast? I like the furniture choice in the middle, and wondered if that was a (highly successful) workaround for a former fireplace.
The whole thing is lovely, and it's making me homesick!
Charming is right! Great personal style!
one of my favorites...love everything! amazing house.
Sigh...my dream house!
"Sigh." My self-esteem is quite a bit lower now.
I love it, I love it, I love it !!! One of the best tours I have seen here. Classical, warm, cosy ... everything fits together. This must be love!
Thank you for sharing it.
Love love love the last photo!
One of the best house tours ever. Beautiful, creative, original mixture of styles and items. The garden -- drop dead gorgeous!
Terrific job.
Beautiful home! Love your kitchen! Would love to see more UK home tours.
i wonder how much it costs to do a room with farrow and ball wallpapers? I'd love to do wall paper in my daughter's room.
Um, the perfection actually makes me sad for my pathetic-in-comparison-space. And want to wallpaper even more. Sigh.
oh, really lovely. i would live here.
OMG - just love it - gives me an "Jane Austen feel" but in a very good 2011 way- Love the garden view. swoon!
Please can you tell me the shade of blue paint in the bedroom - it would be perfect for mine.
I love the tiling in the bathroom. This whole home is just charming.
the library + sitting area is just gorgeous.
Way to end a Friday! This is wonderful, all of it, house and outdoors. You should know there's an alligator on your toilet tank, though :)
Makes me want to move back to Bristol! You have a lovely home. I'm especially jealous of the luscious back garden. It's very difficult to grow anything like that here in Utah.
My heart almost stopped when I saw the photo of your backyard. Between that, the bookshelves, and your lovely floors, this is my dream house. Thank you for sharing it!
How utterly gorgeous. It's enough to make me sob.
lovely. sigh. the child bedroom is wonderful. how did you hang the marrionette puppet on the wall? i have a collection from czech repub. that i would love to hang in my kids' room.
What a beautiful home! I love the kids' room touches. And what a fantastic yard, especially that tree!
I love this home. Charming and cozy, simple yet full of character and warmth. love it!
What a wonderful little boy!!!! Makes me nostalgic for when mine were little. The house is beautiful and the garden is the prettiest I have seen on AT.
I am in love <3
Lovely house, congratulations. It looks very Nordic to my eyes, like pictures in the magazines my mom sends me from Finland.
My dream home.
Looks like a home filled with love. Best house tour ever!
Favorite tour I've seen yet. Perfection. So well done.
That garden comes straight from Frances Hodgson Burnett, doesn't it ? Lovely place to grow up and just grow.
I think I would just park myself in the room that has a view of the wisteria-covered pergola (the pic with your son in it) and I would never leave.
Love the alligator on top of the toilet tank and most of everything else. Charming house.
I think I would just park myself in the room that has a view of the wisteria-covered pergola (the pic with your son in it) and I would never leave.
Love the alligator on top of the toilet tank and most of everything else. Charming house.
I would also like to park myself in the room w/ the wisteria/garden view. Gorgeous in every way. Such a beautiful home and garden and you really do get a feeling of love and comfort - that a family really lives there. I especially love the windows and garden. This is probably my favorite house tour.
Wow! That is one of my favorite bathrooms I've seen in a long time, and I look at design at least 8 hours a day :)
Absolute perfection!
Looks like that cutie in the car has a magically wonderful life in the prettiest, coziest house ever. Thanks for showing.
I LOVE when homes like this are shown! Please feature more of these. Perfect.
conservative, but nice.
LOVE IT!!!!
Thank you for such flattering comments- though we were just saying that the house is never that tidy in real life! I am sorry, I can't remember the paint colour in the bedroom - but most of the paint colours in the rest of the house are Farrow and Ball. Farrow and Ball paper costs about £40 upwards per 10 m roll in the UK - Cole and Sons about the same (but some designs very much more expensive depending on the print process). The space in the bookshelves was left to echo the fireplace at the other end of the room - we felt we needed the wall space for the desk/ maybe other furniture in years to come. We deliberated as to whether to paper the space - in the end settled for papering behind some of the books -but I still have some of the Humming Birds paper in case we decide to do it in the future. The Woods wallpaper has become really popular in the UK in the last few years and I am constantly spotting it on drama sets on TV.
Thanks again to everyone who commented!
The wisteria is unbelievable! Truly lovely home.
I love the garden. Were those pictures taken last year, or is your spring really that far advanced already? I'm in upstate NY, and we just started to green up a bit in the last week or two.
I love this house so much; everything about it is perfect.
It takes an especially talented and sensitive person to create a home with such a feel; hundreds of little decisions must all fall into place and work with each other.
What a dream of a home.
I think my all time favorite home on this site.
Truly lovely.
This looks so much like my cousin's former home in Bristol. I especially love the deep windows with the built-in shutters. Why don't houses come with those here in the U.S.?
Wonderful!
lovely homey home. you can tell it's a sweet life the family has cultivated. seems so much larger than 1500 sq ft.
Love the cream Kitchen, white looks so cleab and nice especially with lots of natural sunlight.
What a dreamy home. Your backyard is breathtaking.
Who is the artist of the photo in image #16? Reminds me of Andrew Moore, a really amazing photographer, and I've long been searching for prints of his works to no avail...
Can I please camp in your garden *drools*. In all seriousness, love your home, it looks so cozy and welcoming. The color scheme in the kitchen and bathroom is so airy and light!
Cute.... Real cute.
Charming indeed. The muted colours and worn, unpretentious furniture make it look like a real, if upmarket, home.
Although I rather resent that fact that Minnie and Charlie have cooler toys than I do ;)
I love the mini spiral steps for the library!
My new favorite.
My daughter had the same pedal car when she was about two. Putting that together at 2am on Christmas day was our worst nightmare, all the instructions were in Japanese, OMG what a night. This house brings back lots of memories for me, I had one just like it (not so nicely done up) I love this house tour, it's my fave.....
I love it--truly charming. But one thing I always wonder...why color-code books? Seems too contrived, somehow. But other than that (and heck, it's just a personal pet peeve, I guess), what a lovely home!
What a beautiful backyard. I'm jealous.
sally305 - because we knock them down or gut them for a 'modern family flow', 'reimagining the space for use in this century' or some bullshit.
echo on all other comments about the lovely, hope US catches on ;)
also, love the alligator on the tank, hilarious!
Something out of a catalogue? What an insult.
Stimulating and mostly a one-off.
I agree w/ the Jane Austen feel, but in a contemporary way. Reminded me a little of the homes featured in the movie Bright Star. Just gorgeous. Love, love the library ladder.
Everything is so gorgeous! I love this tour. Wowee! The garden is beautiful and so lush. I love the wallpaper. And I love the lounge room an the rug. Love everything!
Oh how lovely . Love everything about it. your garden is so me ,this is my ideal kind of garden.
What a beautiful and welcoming house this is!
To quote my 3 yo, "I want to play there!" I'm sure the house was lovely, but we were far too busy envying the toys, the yard, and the little circular stairs to the library shelves.
soulful...
Just lovely! I love the soft colors throughout and then the explosion of color from the outside through the windows. The garden is beautiful. Also love the "nook" by the bookshelves to sit and have a spot of tea.
beautiful. Where is your dining room (?) table from? I love the color.
In the words of Liz Lemon: I want to go to there.
So gorgeous!
Not really my thing, but utterly charming..love the little blue childs room
The garden is heavenly ;)
Very, very inviting.. I bet the owners are warm , friendly, loving people. It just shines through!
Thank you for sharing!
so gorgeous - love the color palette. it feels very serene.
This is really quite amazing. It reminds me of my best friend's apartment in Connecticut. I agree with tanteke, it does look like something out of an Austen novel...although in my opinion it looks even better! Classic, yet updated and sophisticated. Love it. My friend's apartment isn't so light, but she chose similar restored period furniture and accent pieces purchased from lookintheattic. After seeing this, I think she should paint her walls lighter. It makes the whole place look open and happy...definitely will be linking her to this post. Thank you!
Can you tell us where the green bathroom tiles are from? I love that bathroom!
Thank you all for such lovely comments- green tiles called 'metro' from Fired Earth (UK) dining room table and chairs from Habitat 'radius' collection (UK) Photographer of books photograph is Barry Cawston, and Mark agrees about the colour co-ordinating bookshelves -he hates them- one day I am sure they will be reorgansied in alphabetical order. I, on the other hand, really do remember books by the colour of their spines.
What a fantastic house! Absolutely love the vintage finds, mirrors, bed frames, wallpaper, bathroom, and outdoor space. Just wonderful :)
LOL. I always do the house tour before reading so I was going through and thinking "Man, these guys have that whole old English style down!" and then I read the Location line.
So, bravo!
Also, GORGEOUS house!