A sophisticated Primrose Hill flat filled with carefully sourced pieces

Few people have kitchen blinds salvaged from a New England beach house and finished with a raffia trim found at a French market. And few people are the owners of a pair of raffia-skirted chairs from Sierra Leone, which they persuaded their boyfriend to bring home from a work trip.

But these elements, along with over six years’ worth of carefully sourced pieces, are what make Emma Grant’s flat in Primrose Hill so enchanting. That and the fact that its three enormous windows look out across the grassy hill towards London Zoo.

Emma, who worked in fashion for five years after studying at Parsons Paris and City & Guilds of London Art School, came across the flat in 2013. She was living in Kentish Town at the time and had spent almost a year trawling estate agents. ‘Very few places had good lateral space,’ she explains. Thankfully, this elegantly proportioned flat, spread across the first floor of a Victorian villa, delivered, with generously sized rooms, impressive ceiling height and a rather charming soundtrack provided by the zoo’s singing gibbons. ‘I love hearing them every morning,’ says Emma, who now shares the space with her boyfriend, Jack.

The existing layout worked well, with the sitting and dining areas and small adjoining kitchen running across the front of the flat, and the two bedrooms, plus an en-suite bathroom, located at the back. Unfazed by the previous owner’s liberal use of blue paint, Emma lived in the flat for six months before settling on any changes. The space itself was structurally sound, so – other than carving out extra room for a shower from the built-in wardrobe in Emma’s room – very little needed to be done. She called in Stevensons of Norwich to create new plaster panel mouldings for the sitting and dining space, as well as a relief panel for above the door – all designed to sit gracefully alongside the original cornicing.

‘My approach to decorating was quite unrehearsed,’ says Emma, whose vision for the space began with a 19th-century curved-top dining table, found at Lantiques in Petworth and now occupying one end of the living space. ‘I wanted the decoration to develop slowly over time.’ Other than the gloss blue walls in her bedroom – an unintended homage to the previous owners, chosen to provide a foil to the dim north light at the back of the flat – the palette is mainly white and neutrals.