What to do with the ‘middle room’ in a terraced house

For Charlotte Buchanan, one half of husband-wife interior design team Buchanan Studios, “a common problem families have in particular in Edwardian or Victorian houses with this layout, is that this middle room ends up becoming the children’s playroom. It’s also a room you walk through and see all the time, so it’s a challenge of how to have a fun playroom for the children but also make a beautiful space.” To combat this in their own house, Charlotte and her husband Angus designed an ottoman that sits in the middle of the room and works on many levels; it has storage underneath for all the toys (hidden by the loose cover) and acts as somewhere to perch of an evening with a drink. Charmingly, it has separate covers for day and night: its child-friendly daytime cover is made up in hardwearing corduroy, while its fancier nighttime cover is done in their own floral ticking fabric. Polly is fully on board with the smart storage solutions in a middle room, adding “as you typically don’t have much space in this room fitted joinery is a great option. This can house anything from a TV to books and children’s toys.”

On the flip side, the other thing to do with a middle room is lean into its difficulties and design it deliberately to be a less-used space. In her own house in Shepherd’s Bush, interior designer Charlotte Boundy wanted the space to function as a hallway, so it is sparingly decorated with a George III corner cupboard from Ron Green, a George III octagonal tripod table from Robert Kime and an 18th-century Aubusson verdure tapestry from Joshua Lumley. There’s no use for the room in the sense of as a dining room, study or snug but it functions as a lovely thoroughfare.

Charlotte Boundy has used the middle room in her own house as a hallway.

Mark Anthony Fox

In a similar vein, Benedict didn’t make too much of the middle room when conceptualising Max Hurd’s house (pictured top), though he did go large on the decoration. “With Max’s house I knew the narrow space wasn’t going to give anyone joy as a full sitting room,” he details, “but it was needed as a circulation space, an alternate route to the kitchen and dining room without heading along the narrow corridor past the stairs. We termed the space ‘the drawing room’, precisely because its size was anything but – the space does however perform the same function as that lesser-used room. A sofa to read a book on, a smattering of side chairs that can be pulled up for guests to perch on, a drinks table that serves the two rooms either way for parties. We didn’t hold back on colour or decoration, and so whilst the room itself didn’t offer much in the way of floor space, the visuals move it from prosaic to cocktail.”