Creating Happy Rooms

By Anthea Gerrie | Photography courtesy of Mia Karlsson Interior Design

Even a house in the most desirable of locations can be problematic when daylight is in short supply and the vibe is anything but welcoming. Cornelia Busche and her partner discovered this when they moved into what they believed was the London house of their dreams after living and working in China for twenty years.

“It was such a bleak house—and these are not bleak people,” sighs their designer, Mia Karlsson, whose Scandinavian genes have endowed her with the talent to warm up the coldest and darkest of homes, a trick to which Swedes like herself bring the power of rich color, with which she flooded and transformed the residence.

“Creating happier rooms” is how Karlsson describes her brief for the house in the heart of Hampstead, one of London’s most desirable urban villages, not to mention creating a showcase for the couple’s amazing collection of Asian art and objects. “Their love of the eclectic was a joy to lean into, and we were keen to celebrate their art and antiques properly.”

This substantial home in a city where grand houses are often laid out over four or five storeys offered the advantage of four bedrooms and bathrooms across only three floors. “But it was not well arranged,” complains Cornelia, who inherited a semi-subterranean dining room in a country where such basements are a common feature of older homes usually designated for kitchens, dining rooms, and a “coal drop,” where a winter’s worth of fuel was once dispatched from the street and stored to keep a family warm before central heating became the norm.

Cornelia and her partner, who moved in with two teenage children, took what seemed like an obvious first step for the new owners of a dark house that had been neglected for decades, hiring builders to make it bright and habitable.

But bright is not always right when it comes to a warm welcome, they soon discovered. “This first renovation was dominated by white paint, tiles, and other shiny surfaces—the builder would have put in fluorescent lighting if we hadn’t stopped him,” jokes the man of the house. “The result was certainly brighter, but we were missing warmth and color.”

Karlsson’s website, packed with a plethora of richly-hued projects, attracted the couple. She came to the rescue with her unique penchant for creating rooms that are playful as well as warm and welcoming. “We like to be cozy even when it’s minus 20 outside,” explains the designer, who hails from Lapland in Sweden’s far north, which sees barely a couple of hours of daylight in the midwinter months. “We have reindeer where I grew up!”

Although her tour de force in taking on the sound but somewhat soulless residence was transforming the basement, her starting point was the entrance. “This was the biggest missed opportunity—a long hallway stretching from the front to the back of the house with huge wow potential.” Her solution was to flood the space with the warmest and most flattering hue on the color wheel. “A once white and gray corridor with small doors and lackluster lighting became an unapologetic burst of color and joy,” she says of the space now immersed in peachy pink.

The next step was installing two sets of mirrored double doors, opening the hall to a spectacular deep purple-red dining room with a sunny yellow ceiling on one side. On the other side, the kitchen and living room are adjacent to the terraced yard. Other highlights include a hidden home office and a powder room that presents itself as nothing less than a tropical jungle.

Wooden floors in the hall were replaced with cement tiles, which pick up the pink, trimmed with the blue and orange echoed in the living room. A major new feature was the first of many bespoke pieces of joinery, created to provide much-needed storage that seems to vanish into the walls.

Opposite a handsome arched mirror sits the powder room, which is one of several fantasy-lands the house presents—and the only one guests are likely to encounter. The pristine white tiles of yesteryear were pulled out, and forest green replacements were installed, complete with a matching sink and textured mural wallpaper awash with palms and leopards. Next door, a former tiled cloakroom has been transformed into a study paneled in pink fluted wood, which tones with office furniture in deep coral and a very non-standard cabinet with an arched top, echoing the graceful archways of the hall.

But the stars of the ground floor are the cozy living room and the dining room, decorated in the “moodier” palette Karlsson chose to set the tone for stylish entertaining. While all the light fixtures in this home have star quality, the bespoke feather-trimmed chandelier in the dining room eclipses them all. “We had to have this fixture, so it led us to the purple paint on the walls,” explains Karlsson, whose favourite color is actually the orange she specified for the joinery incorporating shutters on the living room wall, which opens onto the garden. There is a pop of bright purple here, too, in the sofa cushions, and high ceilings in both rooms offer great display space for the couple’s stash of large paintings, many brought from China. “We were constrained by the limits of the wall space we had in Shanghai, lovely though our 1920s house was there,” explains Cornelia.

The three bedrooms upstairs are approached via a spectacular landing, which conjures up yet another fantasy world. “A mythical forest full of mythical creatures,” is how Karlsson describes the Andrew Martin mural wallpaper roaming across not only walls but a bespoke linen cupboard, bearing out Karlsson’s belief that “transitional spaces deserve just as much attention as rooms.” Beyond, a spectacular chandelier can be glimpsed between two bedrooms connected by the shower room shared by Cornelia and her daughter. The unexpected burst of colorful tiles in the master bathroom—blue contrasting with yellow, a color scheme Karlsson picked for the shower room—was a rare concession from the builders whose mission was to paint everything else in the house white.

The sleeping accommodation is not restricted to the privacy of the upper level. In the semi-basement, Mia conducted her greatest transformation, a fourth bedroom within a self-contained apartment—“for guests, the current guest being a teenager,” laughs Cornelia. It sits behind a huge entertainment space filled with the modular Mah Jong seating by Roche Bobois, a collaboration with renowned 1970s designers, including Hans Hopfer, Missoni, and Gaultier, allowing the seating units to be rearranged at will. The walls of this former dining room, once sterile white, are now flooded with rich burgundy, providing a perfect backdrop for the eye-poppingly colorful cushions.

This home of endless surprises holds one more —the most unexpected of all —as we come to the end of the house tour: a total transformation of the subterranean coal drop once used for nothing but a fuel store. Mostly a bar recreating the ’70s with its lava lamp and retro record player, this once-defunct area is also functional, backing onto a wall of new bookshelves.

“With wonderfully open-minded clients, we transformed this once-damp cellar, cold and unusable, into a 1970s wine bar and DJ booth,” says Karlsson, who seems proudest of all her achievements in the tiny nook she celebrates as “a warm, inviting space designed for years of memorable evenings.” She could well be talking about the whole of this once-unlovable, now totally adorable, house when she adds, “The clients love it.”

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Visit MiaKarlsson.co.uk to learn more and see more projects.