Traditional Cloakroom
Kelvedon

Downstairs cloakrooms usually get whatever is left over. This one — the smallest of three rooms we designed for the same Kelvedon home, alongside the family shower room and an ensuite — got the boldest decision in the house.

The upper walls are papered in a shorebird print, with tongue-and-groove panelling below it and a dado rail between the two. Panelling, dado, skirting and door are all painted in the same soft pink — Little Greene Confetti — so the bottom half of the room reads as one colour and the birds get to be the pattern. The floor is a small-format patterned tile in sage, cream and dusty pink that picks up both.

Against all that, the furniture is deliberately quiet. It is Calypso Pentland in Portland Stone, a warm grey-green Shaker run in three widths so the basin, the WC and a slim cupboard sit in one unbroken line under a white worktop. The handles and plaque are brushed brass, and so is everything else that could be — the JTP Grosvenor lever mixer, the towel radiator, the robe hooks, the light switch and even the door handle.

An arched LED mirror from HiB runs almost the full length of the worktop, which is what stops a narrow room feeling narrow — it doubles the window and throws warm light back across the panelling. A Roper Rhodes concealed cistern with a brushed brass oval button keeps the WC end clean. The room was planned through our bathroom design service.