A Drawing Room in Three Versions
The first time I saw the drawing room at the house on Cheyne Walk, it did not have a floor. There were joists, a builder’s radio playing Magic FM and a single bare bulb that someone had hung from a hook in the ceiling rose. The interior designer I had come to interview, a woman who has spent twenty years doing up houses in this part of London, picked her way across the planks, opened her laptop on a trestle table and said, “This is what it will look like.”
She turned the screen round. It was the same room, the same tall windows onto the river, but finished. Lime-washed walls. A green velvet sofa you could lose a weekend in. An old Persian rug gone pink with age, brass candlesticks on the marble mantel, and that low river light bouncing up onto the ceiling the way it only does in Chelsea in October. I’d have captioned it as a photograph without a second thought. It wasn’t one.
Why the Client Needed Pictures
The client, she explained, was a collector who had bought the house after selling a flat in Monaco. He knew exactly what he liked and could not read a drawing to save his life. Mood boards bored him. Fabric samples on a table told him nothing. He needed to see the room.
Clients like him used to give her sleepless nights. “You agree a swatch, the mill in Como takes twelve weeks, the upholsterer takes another four,” she said, “and then he walks in and says, very nicely, that he’d pictured it lighter.” On a house like this one, getting a sofa wrong costs about what my first car did. Possibly more.
So these days, for anything at this level, she works with a studio that provides 3D interior rendering services. Her office sends them everything: drawings, the survey, the joinery, and a finishes schedule so long she printed it double-sided to save trees. Then the room gets built on a computer and lit the way this particular house actually catches the sun.
One Room, Three Moods
What fascinated me was not the single beautiful picture. It was the fact that she had three.
She clicked through them for me. Version one was the green velvet with the lime-wash. Version two swapped in putty walls and a rusty terracotta linen, which I rather liked. Then there was number three, which she almost didn’t send, the walls were panelled and painted a dark, inky blue, with the green sofa again and much more brass.
“He chose the third one in about four seconds,” she said. “I was certain he’d want the first.”
The dark blue had been her assistant’s idea, added almost as an afterthought. In a sample pot on a white wall it looked severe. Put into the real room, with the river light and all that brass, it went somewhere else entirely. Jewellery box was the phrase she used, and I can’t improve on it. He had the picture printed and propped it on his desk until the builders left. When the painters finally mixed the blue, they matched it against that print, not the paint card. The paint card, apparently, was a shade too green, and nobody would have known until the second coat.
The Stone that Changed
The renderings also helped with things that are easy to get wrong and expensive to put right. The bathroom on the second floor was designed around a slab of Calacatta Viola marble, a wildly veined stone with streaks of burgundy. A sample the size of a paperback is gorgeous. Spread over a wall, the bath and the floor? He said it was like being inside a steak. He wasn’t wrong, I saw the image.
So they tried again. Viola on the bath surround only, and a soft honed limestone for the rest, the kind of stone you stop noticing after a day, which is the point. That’s what got built. The marble is still the priciest thing in the room by a mile, and nobody had to learn that lesson with a cut slab on a lorry outside.
What Rendering Cannot Do
Did the pictures ever get it wrong, I asked. Long pause, and a sip of builder’s tea from a mug that said World’s Best Grandad, which I was too polite to ask about.
“Texture, sometimes.” You can see a velvet in a picture, you can’t sit on it, so every fabric still goes through the client’s hands. And smell, which made us both laugh. These houses smell of beeswax and cold stone and a bit of river. No computer’s getting near that, and honestly, good.
The other risk is the pictures being too good. No dust, no wobbly plaster, no crack running along the cornice. A Georgian house has all three by Tuesday, so she warns clients up front that the real rooms will look a bit more lived-in. Most of them, she said, prefer it that way once they are living there.
Returning in the Spring
I went back to Cheyne Walk the following April, when the house was finished. The drawing room was exactly as I had seen it on the laptop in the dust. Blue panelling, green sofa, the candlesticks. Even the river light was hitting the ceiling where the picture said it would.
There was one difference. On the sofa, where the rendering had a neat pair of cushions, the client’s old spaniel was asleep, snoring gently, entirely unconcerned that he was the only thing in the room that nobody had planned.
