Does your sitting room feel a little tired? Not broken, not wrong – just somehow stuck. You’ve browsed the internet and scrolled mood boards on social media, but still nothing has quite clicked into place. Here’s a thought: stop looking forward and look back instead. Our archive goes deep, and it turns out to be one of the most useful places to find a way through. So let’s have a look at some of our favourite sitting rooms from the past and see what we can take from them today.
The shelves that do all the talking
Barton Court, Terence Conran’s Berkshire country house, was photographed by Lord Snowdon for House & Garden in 1984. Conran had bought the house in 1971 and made it his own with the same instinct he brought to everything – considered, personal, and never particularly reverent about mixing periods or purposes.
The sitting room shows it well. White walls, wooden floors, kilim rugs underfoot, a chaise longue alongside a no-nonsense trestle table. What pulls the room together is the wall of shelving on the far wall – a continuous display of objects, framed pieces, small sculptures and books, arranged with enough care to read as a collection rather than clutter.
Take this as your sign to give your things a proper home. Not a cabinet, not a cupboard – a shelf where the things you’ve gathered over time can actually be seen. It costs very little and reveals more about the person behind the room than almost any other single decorative decision.
Colour, pattern, repeat
The sitting room of this house in the Alpilles was originally the barn. Writer and former banker Sarah St George shared the property with Maxime de la Falaise – artist, fashion and furniture designer, and, by all accounts, a singular force – and together they had took a gloomy mid-19th-century Provençal farmhouse and transformed it into something else entirely, photographed by House & Garden in 2001.
The rough-hewn ceiling beams are painted with intricate African-inspired designs, part of a collection of objects and furniture that Maxime had decorated over many years, now assembled together. The walls are striped in cadmium yellow and red ochre; two George Smith sofas in fabrics by John Stefanidis bring further hits of orange, yellow and blue. The lesson here is to embrace bright colour and mix it freely with pattern – and mean it. It only works when you commit fully. Half-measures would have made this room merely odd; the courage to go all the way is what makes it sing.
More is more, and less is a bore
This is the drawing room at Ven House, a baroque country house in Somerset, photographed in 1999. The owners, Thomas Kyle and Jerome Murray, had spent six years transforming it from a property sold up during a divorce into something close to magnificence. Thomas had worked with John Fowler, the doyen of English country house style, and at Ven employed Fowler’s pupil David Mendel for all the decorative paint finishes. The collection they brought to it – French Impressionists, pieces acquired from Geoffrey Bennison, objects bought over 35 years from dealers in Paris and London – did the rest.
The result is a room that makes no apologies for its own abundance. Terracotta walls, an elaborate plasterwork ceiling, a crystal chandelier, blue silk swag curtains, gilt-framed portraits, damask sofas and classical statuary – all of it held together by an eye trained over decades.
Nobody is suggesting you replicate the grandeur (unless your budget allows for it!) but there is something worth absorbing here: a room can carry a great deal when every element has been chosen with genuine care. Accumulation and clutter are not the same thing.
Texture and tone do the heavy lifting
This is the sitting room of Kit Kemp’s weekend house on the south coast, photographed in 2000. Kit and her husband Tim had bought a 1930s house that, by her own admission, had ‘not one redeeming feature’ – and remodelled it entirely, knocking through rooms to create generous, gallery-like spaces with a cleanness of line unusual for a country retreat.
The sitting room shows what she means by that. Gingham-upholstered armchairs and sofas, raw oak beams, a sisal rug, stripped wooden floors, a driftwood mirror – the palette barely strays from cream, stone and natural oak. There is no bold colour statement, no pattern clash. And yet the room feels entirely alive.
Kit herself put it best: for her, decorating is about building up texture and tone. This room is proof of that. The warmth comes not from colour but from the layering of natural materials – the roughness of the beam against the softness of the check fabric, the flatness of the sisal against the gleam of the floor. A neutral room and a dull room are very different things.
Let the walls stand back
Collector Marcella Rossi had a philosophy about colour that is worth taking seriously: ‘I’m not wild on colour, as you can see. Colour tends to intrude; it should fade away, allowing the pieces to stand out.’ Her first-floor London flat, photographed in 1985, makes the case quietly but conclusively.
Warm greige panelled walls, two plain cream sofas, a white brushed Chinese silk carpet with an 18th-century Samarkand rug laid over it, a lucite coffee table – nothing competes. Above the white marble chimneypiece hangs a modern abstract by Max Wimmer, its blocks of burgundy and gold suddenly vivid against the quiet room behind it.
Neutrality here is not a safe choice but an active one – a way of editing the space so that the things that matter are the ones you actually see. If you have art or objects worth looking at, consider getting out of their way.
Contrast is always a good idea
Pale walls, dark furniture, elaborate white plasterwork – this Paris living room works on contrast alone. It belonged to fashion designer Andrew Gn, photographed here in 1996 when he was just 29, already internationally acclaimed after cutting his teeth in Ungaro’s atelier. He called it his ‘cooling-down room, excellent for clearing the mind and for real solitude’.
What makes it more than just a study in black and white is the tension between the formal and the eclectic. Empire and Directoire pieces sit alongside 1970s nesting tables and a maquette of a Sobrino sculpture. Gn described his approach as buying things he liked and ‘scooping them all together’, which sounds casual but is clearly anything but. Start with contrast if you are unsure where to start at all. A high-contrast scheme is one of the most reliable moves in a room, and this one shows exactly why.
Less, but make it count
Interior designer Chester Jones was called in to work on a Chelsea flat in 2002, with a brief that could have gone either way. The owners wanted something drastic. What they got was a lesson in the power of editing. Birch veneer covers the walls throughout, unifying the space and replacing traditional detailing – skirting, cornices – that Chester stripped out entirely. The furniture is a spare mix of mid-20th-century originals and custom-made pieces. The room breathes. As Jones put it: ‘If you have a tiny space, you have to make a very simple statement. Anything else would be claustrophobic.’
Above the fireplace, a row of decorative tiles is hung as a single panel of art rather than used in any conventional way – specific, considered, quietly surprising. The owners said it well: ‘Knowing how to achieve this degree of simplicity takes experience.’ Editing a room down to what actually matters is harder than filling it, but the result is a space that feels entirely intentional.
Seven rooms, seven different answers – which is rather the point. There is no single way to refresh a sitting room, but there is always a way in. Pick the idea that unsettles you most. That is probably the one worth trying.
