Name: 3 Interior Designers Transform The Same Abandoned Victorian Living Room | Architectural Digest
Uploaded: 2025-03-10T23:01:41.000Z
Duration: 18 min 33 s
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These three interior designers have been given a photograph of an abandoned Victorian living room.

They have free reign to design it in any way they please.

I'm Naz, and my design is bold, it's colorful, and sometimes it's a little fearless.

My name's Kat, and my design style is unexpected, luxurious, and inquisitive.

I'm Hema, and my style is global, rich, and livable.

No clients, no restrictions, just blank space.

My first impressions of this space are that it probably was once a very beautiful and grand room.

I do really love the original features of the space.

It's clearly an old Victorian living room, but it's been messed with over time.

There's a lot that I don't have to stick with, and a lot of things that I will honor, because it's great, but it's not all original.

Looking at this room, there is one word that comes to mind, and it is demo.

My vision for this space is basically preserving a lot of the elements that I love about it, restoring some of that grandeur to the space that I think has been lost over time to just wear and non-original, non-heritage things, but then make it whimsical and colorful for that really cool contrast that I love in older homes.

I love the idea of a game room. I love game nights.

I want to design a game room that feels sexy, like game night in Casablanca.

It's going to have that very lush, sultry feel to it.

My vision for the space is to try and maintain a lot of its original charm and character, but have a lot of fun with the colors and the furniture that we use and bring it into this century.

Looking at these floors, they look like an old parquet wood.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't rip something like this out, but I don't think there's any salvaging them.

It's too far gone, so I'm going to replace it.

So I want to do something more fun, like a checkerboard.

Half of the checkers are going to be wood, white oak, and then the other half of the checkers I'm going to do in walnut wood.

I want to make sure that I'm adding in floors that are very complementary to the existing features.

I'm going to opt in to do a new parquet flooring that feels brighter and fresher.

I think it would be really fun to play off of the geometric shapes that are seen throughout the rest of the space.

I'm going to introduce a wall-to-wall carpet, and I think it's going to add that plush, sexy feeling that we're going for in this space.

I do feel strongly that from an acoustical and warmth standpoint, we should have a rug.

This rug from Saffar, I think it's really cool, because you can see in the detail that they actually sheared between each color more of a ridge, so you can really texturally feel all these colors transitioning.

In addition to the parquet floor, I've been dying to use this rug by Edward Fields.

It's called Daisy. It's really whimsical.

Also, there's an interesting history of Victorian houses and American hippies, so I think it brings a really fun summer of love thing to the space.

I really love the original wall paneling, and I just think it needs a bit of a facelift, so I'm going to paint it a really beautiful shade of blue.

And inside the trim, I'm going to go one shade lighter than the walls to really emphasize that detail and create some contrast.

I love the original fireplace, and I want to try and keep that, but paint it in the same light blue as the walls.

The only details, honestly, that I would preserve here are these beautiful big windows.

We're going to rip out all this old wood paneling.

It kind of feels oppressive in the space.

So on the back wall where we've got windows, we're going to do this beautiful gold wallpaper by Calico.

You can see there's like a little bird motif. It's very reflective.

Not only am I going to visually sort of divide the space with different wall treatments throughout,

I'm actually going to physically divide it.

So I've included these vintage floor-to-ceiling window panes, and I'm going to add different colors of stained glass throughout to really capture this beautiful light flowing through these big windows.

I love wood paneling, but it just doesn't behave with anything.

It's almost as if someone retrofitted other architectural panels from another house and put them on the walls.

So we're just going to redo the paneling, and then we'll move that over.

So we're just going to redo the paneling, and then we'll move that all the way through this entire room.

And as far as finish goes, I have this idea of doing like Saroost, which is basically they put white wax inside the wood grain, and then you stain the wood.

That way the grain really lights up, even though you've stained it a color that's darker than the wood.

I want to do a Saroost denim blue stain all over the panels.

I like the idea of adding some more fabric to the room to help absorb sound.

So we're just going to do very simple, very tall floor-to-ceiling drapes with a ceiling-mounted brass rod.

The windows are really beautiful, but currently the drapes are hiding them.

They're blocking out a lot of natural light.

The best thing to do is just remove them completely and continue the paint detailing.

This is a space that isn't necessarily a bedroom.

I don't think you need privacy here, so I really love how it lets all the natural light flood in as well.

I don't like this fireplace, although I know it's probably historically preserved and people out there are clutching their pearls.

But we're going to visually expand the fireplace to take up more of the wall and create this like central gaming area.

And I'm going to use this beautiful Zelige tile. It's from Morocco. It's meant to be imperfect.

And then off to the left, we're going to put a built-in with this beautiful khaki green paint by Farrow & Ball.

And it's going to be where we house all our board games and anything else that sort of belongs in a game room.

With regard to the fireplace, I feel very strongly that it should be bigger.

But I'm going to go with a very traditional Breccia Capraia or Calacatta Viola marble.

But I will say I love a mantle because I personally celebrate Christmas, which is a holiday requiring stockings for Santa.

So I do want to retain the shelf, that mantle shelf, rather than running the marble all the way up the wall.

On the right-hand side in the original space, we've got this sort of tiny, nondescript wood door.

It's meant to be a hidden door. I think a room like this deserves a grand entrance.

So I'm going to expand the door to make it a double door.

And we're going to carry the wallpaper from the back all the way around to the right.

For the ceiling, I would love to continue the blue to the soffits.

There's currently these drop panels. I want to remove those.

And I think it would be really cool if we did a mirrored tile treatment inside each of the soffits to help reflect the natural light that's coming into the space and also introduce a new, more modern material into the room.

The ceiling in our original room has like a funny sort of tray ceiling.

I'm not really sure what's going on there, but I don't like it.

So I'm going to get rid of it, and I'm going to build out a coffered ceiling.

But we're going to create sort of this grid design that's going to mirror the fireplace and mirror the floor.

In between each of these squares, I'm going to use my favorite wallpaper.

And the reason why is I want to do something really major, mural-wise.

It's actually like a super hyper-colorful version of something that I've done in collaboration with decorative artist Caroline Lizarraga on a similarly-sized Victorian living room in San Francisco in real life.

But it's kind of like a watercolor-looking sort of like splashes of rainbow.

I love the idea of a finish like that because there's a lot of negative space, a lot of quiet white ceiling, and then gorgeous splashes of color like all over the place that just sort of make the whole room feel whimsical and improvisational.

One of the funny challenges about having a large room is that sometimes it's a little bit too large.

There are totally times where I have clients with homes this size and rooms this size where they're like, how do I even decorate this thing?

With a room of this size, there's a lot of different ways to approach it.

For this space specifically, I want to try and create a focal point in the center with the furniture.

I'm obsessed with this vintage sofa by Claudio Solloci.

I'm going to reupholster the sofa in this really beautiful soft cream leather by Maharam.

Next to the sofa, I want to bring in this beautiful bamboo and brass side table by Gabriella Crespi.

As I think about furniture, I need to zone this room, right?

And I want there to be beautiful spaces for hosting, but also spaces for sort of like quiet contemplation or maybe just two people.

So we'll do an accent chair kind of over here.