Designer style: unloved East End cottage refit is a masterclass in industrial-chic interiors and maintaining original charm

Sometimes, when old houses are described as “transformed”, it means their guts have been ripped out, leaving them plain and bare shells.

Not so with the 1890s cottage belonging to interior designer Stephen Nash, his events-manager wife, Miranda May, and cats Topanga and Rye, in Haggerston.

The couple have genuinely transformed a time-warped house of tiny rooms — “so many it was bonkers, but no toilet, just one outside, in a garden of waist-high brambles,” Nash says.

The house had been untouched for decades, and the back part was very damp.

They paid £250,000 above their budget when they bought the 1,090sq ft two-storey house in 2015. Nash, now 35, was a property consultant when May, who’s 32, walked into the office seeking advice on altering her flat in 2013. “It was love at first sight,” he says.

Instead of doing up her flat they were soon looking for a house together. For her a garden was a must; for him, something that needed complete renovation.

Both wanted to live east. They’d lost out on five properties when May insisted Nash view the cottage. “I’d already spotted it and hoped she hadn’t,” he says — with its bay window at the front, he felt it “smacked of suburbia”. But “when she dragged me along, we both wanted it before even going inside”.

Despite its condition, they lived there for four months deciding what to do, before drawing up plans. After a bit of to-and-fro (this is an unusual home in a conservation area) the planners approved.

Meanwhile Nash formed his interior-architecture practice. This would be his second whole-house project.

They decided to open up the ground floor by putting a Crittall-style set of doors across the back and take out some internal walls as major alterations, then add plentiful charm, detail and spirit, with shutters and parquet here and polished concrete there, and a wood-burning stove.

Mid-century furniture, stylish lighting, strong paint colours and many plants and artefacts create a modern take on the cottage’s original, slightly quirky arts-and-crafts flavour.

Nash put in plumbing upstairs and carved a delightful bathroom off the large back bedroom and put a second loo under the stairs.

The bathroom, with its neat pocket door and brass fittings, illustrates what has been done throughout: it may be small but it’s opened to the exposed rafters, creating drama through height, and the old chimney ascends through it, whitewashed, with a steel from which plants hang.

And it’s completely tanked, so there’s a curvy bath and a rainwater shower, side by side.

“When we met, Miranda was the untidiest person in the world,” Nash grins. “I think she coined the term ‘floor-drobe’.”

In response, he built an entire wall of wardrobes across the side wall of their bedroom, the middle doors of which fold back on double hinged doors, revealing a lovely, concealed dressing-table and shelves, with its own little stool tucked away, just for her.

Putting a slight twist on things adds character. Nash floored the cosy, dark-walled sitting room at the front with unusual, grey-stained parquet.

The rest of the ground floor is open-plan with an underheated concrete floor, with a nicely retro kitchen area — reclaimed oak parquet surfaces the wooden-cabinetry kitchen island, but with terrazzo cast on site round the sink, intelligently avoiding water damage. The same terrazzo runs along the work surface.

During the year-long build, so many bricks were unleashed from the internal walls that Nash had the brainwave of skinning the spine wall with them, which hides all the new pipework and wiring and creates extra sound- and heat-proofing.

Painted white, it just looks like an exposed wall. The finished effect is rich, warm and lively, curiously reinterpreting the original spirit of the house in a modern, un-twee way.

This was always going to be a big job: it took a year. When the concrete slab was laid for the extended back, the structural engineer decided the entire back of the house needed to be rebuilt. Hence a steel frame and some big steels.

However, a virtue was made out of the steels, some of which are visible as a skeleton sign of where walls once ran. But that is the whole point of this house — their attention to detail which adds to its overall charm.