Designing a Relaxed Family Home in Richmond: A House Designer Project

Richmond is one of those parts of London where the housing stock does a lot of the heavy lifting. The Edwardian detached homes that line its quieter streets come with high ceilings, generous rooms, and the kind of original architectural detail that most people spend years trying to replicate elsewhere. The challenge is never the bones of the house. It is making it feel like a home rather than a period showcase: warm, personal, practical for a young family, and genuinely beautiful all at once.

That was exactly the brief for this project. A family with young children, a detached Edwardian property in Richmond, and a very clear set of priorities: a home that works hard every day without looking like it does.

Designing a Family Home, Not Just Individual Rooms

One of the most important decisions made early in the process was to run all five rooms concurrently rather than treating each one in isolation. This is how House Designer approaches multi-room projects as standard, and the difference it makes to the finished result is significant.

The soft blue-grey wall colour that flows throughout the house is a good example of why this matters. It reads as almost silver in the light-filled reception room, deepens to something moodier in the evening in the dining room, and in the children’s rooms it creates a calm, airy backdrop that works equally well behind navy blue and soft pink. It is a decision that could only be made with the whole house in view, and it is the kind of whole-home design thinking that separates a considered project from a room-by-room shopping exercise.

The broader palette, warm walnut, aged brass, natural linen, and textured weaves, recurs across every room at different scales and in different combinations. Nothing feels imported from a different house. Everything feels chosen.

The Reception Room: Bold Anchor, Quiet Surround

The reception room anchors the ground floor and had to work simultaneously as a family living space and somewhere worth entertaining in. The design responded to the original marble fireplace rather than competing with it, using it as the focal point around which everything else is arranged.

A deep chocolate velvet sofa is the statement piece here, deliberately bold and deliberately grown-up. Around it, the room is quieter: a boucle cocktail chair, a sculptural round coffee table in whitewashed timber, a walnut sideboard with brass handles, and a large antique brass disc mirror above the fireplace that reflects light from the sash windows opposite. Two abstract prints in gold frames bring a gallery quality to the wall without the room ever feeling like a display space.

The brass arc floor lamp beside the sofa and the woven pouffe add warmth and informality. A Samsung Frame TV integrates into the chimney breast wall so seamlessly that the room never reads as a media room, even when it is functioning as one.

What makes this room work is the confidence of the furniture choices balanced against genuine restraint in the styling. The sofa earns its place precisely because everything around it allows it to.

The Dining Room: Walnut, Moss Green and Evening Atmosphere

The dining room in this Richmond Edwardian home is a dedicated space with its own identity, and the design leans fully into that. A large extending walnut dining table seats eight comfortably, surrounded by Wishbone-style chairs in moss green mohair velvet. The combination of walnut, green and the blue-grey walls is particular and considered in a way that feels nothing like a showroom floor.

A brass sputnik chandelier drops low over the table and shifts the feeling of the room completely in the evening. A console table on the adjacent wall, dressed with a marble lamp and an oversized abstract canvas print, gives the room depth and a sense of occasion without formality. A fiddle leaf fig in a textured stone pot brings something living and organic into the composition.

This is a room that works equally well for a weekday family dinner and a Saturday evening with friends. The extending table is the practical choice that also happens to be exactly right aesthetically.

The Living Room: Layered, Informal and Comfortable

The living room carries a softer, more informal energy than the rooms alongside it. A large stone-grey L-shaped sofa anchors the space, with a pair of natural linen occasional chairs positioned to create a proper conversation zone. A round walnut coffee table, an ivory hand-tufted rug, and a mix of cream and bronze cushions layer warmth and texture throughout.

Two pieces of the family’s own artwork were incorporated into the design here, a detail that speaks to how the House Designer process actually works. The brief is always about the people living in the house, not about imposing a finished aesthetic over everything they already own. Working with what a client has, rather than replacing it, is a mark of considered interior design.

The Little Boy’s Room: Built Around His World

Two children, two rooms, two completely different worlds, and both designed with the same rigour as the adult spaces.

The little boy’s room is built around a love of Star Wars and Lego. The navy bed frame with under-drawer storage makes the most of the floor space, and a full wall of white built-in storage, wardrobe, overhead shelving, and open display cubes, keeps the room from feeling chaotic even when life inevitably makes it so. A proper study desk with flanking drawer units gives him somewhere to work that feels designed for him rather than borrowed from a spare room.

Lego brick shelves in blue and black are mounted on the feature wall. They are genuinely useful, they carry the personality of the room, and they will still look right in five years. The spaceship rug and the orange bean bag finish a children’s bedroom that a child will want to spend time in and that parents will not find difficult to look at.

Designing a child’s bedroom in a period property like this requires the same spatial intelligence as any other room in the house. The storage planning here is meticulous, the proportions are respected, and the personality comes through in the details rather than in themed furniture that dates the moment their interests shift.

The Little Girl’s Room: Calm, Personal and Full of Character

The little girl’s room operates from the same structural logic, storage, study, sleep and play, but arrives somewhere entirely different in character. Soft gingham bedding, a sage green scalloped bedside table, a checkerboard rug in beige and white, and a rose pink bobbin lamp create a room with a specific calm femininity that feels considered rather than themed.

A KALLAX shelving unit doubles as a room divider between the sleep and play zones, a clever piece of spatial planning in a room that has a great deal to do. Horse figurines on the open shelving and a scalloped pegboard on the wall personalise the space around this child’s world without locking the room into something she will outgrow.

The scalloped details, the bedside table, the pegboard, the cushions, the lamp, are small touches that cost very little individually but collectively define the room’s character. This is where the expertise in the interior design process becomes most visible: knowing which details carry the most weight, and where to let a room breathe.

Budget, Savings and the Value of Seeing It First

Across all five rooms, the total furnishing cost came to just over £11,400 at full retail. Through House Designer’s trade relationships and buying power, the family made savings of over £1,000 on the overall project, money that went back into the house rather than into retail margins.

The financial saving is genuinely useful, but it is almost secondary to the other kind of value the process delivers. Every room in this project was visualised as a photorealistic 3D render before a single item was purchased. Not a mood board and not an approximation: the actual furniture, in the actual room, at the correct scale. For a family making significant investments across five rooms of a Richmond family home, that level of certainty is worth a great deal.

The shopping list that accompanied each room design included direct purchase links, quantities, and everything needed to move straight from approved design to ordered furniture. The distance between the render and the finished room was as small as it could possibly be.

What Good Family Home Interior Design Actually Looks Like

There is a version of interior design for families with children that treats style as something to return to later, where everything is wipeable and nothing is precious. This project is an argument against that entirely.

A well-designed family home in Richmond does not look different from a beautifully designed home for anyone else. It is simply a home where the brief has been listened to properly, where the design decisions have been made with intelligence and care, and where the people living in it feel entirely themselves from the moment they walk through the door.

Explore more projects like this in our interior design portfolio, find out more about our interior design packages, or book a free consultation to talk through your own project with our team.