Aug 9

Aug 9 Ciara Elliott, Editor of Essential Kitchens Bathrooms and Bedrooms (EKBB). A colourful home

I am delighted to welcome Ciara Elliott, Editor of Essential Kitchens Bathrooms and Bedrooms (EKBB) to my blog. I have known Ciara for a little while, when she and a group of friends took over a hashtag I co-ran on Instagram #colourmyhome,a treasure-trove of all things colourful. Ciara's home is gorgeous both inside and out, filled with vintage finds and lots and lots of colour, against a neutral backdrop, it is both comfortable and stylish, a mix that is quite hard to get right. It has been a renovation project to get here though, read below to find out more about her and her house

Ciara Elliott is a lifestyle journalist and interiors editor for EKBB magazine. She has two children – Edie and Astrid and although originally from Dublin she has been living in the UK for five years now. Her partner Ben, whom she met in Dublin, when she was a fashion editor of a Sunday Newspaper, is a big wine expert and foodie and even though he proposed ten years ago, they have never got around to getting married so this summer they are taking the plunge and tying the knot in their local church and village hall on 26th August. Good Luck Ciara!

Ciara is modernising and renovating a former artist’s 200-year-old family house in the English countryside into a cosy home for her young family, with a modern granny annex too. When they bought the house, it co-incided with her partner Ben's mother retiring, so they pooled resources and bought the house together, bringing not only onsite help with the children but making the whole house buy doable.

“The house hadn’t been modernised for about 40 years,” says Ciara “A lovely couple - a Royal Academy artist called Peter Coker and his wife, Vera - had lived here all their married lives, and while they had maintained it to a certain degree they had spent nothing, so the windows were all rotting, there was rising damp, dry rot, peeling wallpaper. It really needed the full works. He was a keen gardener and that had been landscaped in the French style, with a lily pond and lavender, but the house was sort of falling down around them when they died.”

The family continued to rent around the corner when the first renovations, which involved gutting the house and installing new plumbing, electrics and gas, got underway. They needed a new roof as well as a whole new heating system and even had to get the gas connected on the national grid.

“Even though it was stressful, as we kept finding more problems the more we stripped the house, it was also such an exciting time as every day we felt we discovered something new about the house,” says Ciara “We found old newspapers from the 1920s and there were floors underneath floors, we eventually uncovered the old original Victorian floor tiles in our porch. I’d love to write a book about it someday.”

Ciara is drawn to beautiful shapes, sculpture, items and artwork. "I physically couldn't live without colour and embellishment and pictures everywhere so maybe I am sort of "hippy boho". I also really love handmade objects and artwork generally, although I am not a massive fan of upcycling. I do believe in paying a price for original furniture and artwork and would rather hold out and have nothing than fill my house with IKEA lookalikes."