Renovating your Edwardian style home

Edwardian homes are beautiful and light compared to their predecessors of the Victorian Era. Due to the dark nature of the homes of the Queen’s era, one can easily look at the short-lived Edwardian era as the light at the end of the tunnel. This ‘light’ does, to a great degree, do an amazing job at expressing the feelings of an Edwardian era home with King Edward VII’s reign only lasting a short nine years one can see why these homes are a rare gem indeed. This blog post covers the many ways you can renovate your Edwardian home to its former glory, including the walls, floors, doors, furniture and accent items.

Starting with the Walls and Floors:

Let’s start with the walls. When selecting wallpaper for an Edwardian style home, you don’t want bleak and dull; in fact, one should just remove those from their vocabulary if they own one of these houses. What you want is something cheerful--a floral pattern or stripes and even ribbon. Just remember that the house is supposed to have a light-hearted and informal vibe. Now for the floors, the bonus to doing these things in this order is that you get to rip up the old floor and have all debris from the walls taken out at the same time. The living room needs bright block wood flooring and oriental style rugs. These homes are based on an era of change and alteration. The rooms with more foot traffic and less sitting about should have brick flooring, the herringbone pattern comes to mind, but think cheerful and you can’t go wrong.

Furniture and Accent Items:

Here comes the best part -- the decorating and ‘filling in.’ Starting with furniture, the first part of this is pretty simple as many of the furniture of the time was just reused. Basically, the styles were the same or quite similar to that of the Victorian Era. Some of these styles include the Baroque and Empire. Now, during the Edwardian period, wicker and bamboo furniture were both new and quickly growing in popularity. These types of furniture are all viable for your remodel. Then there are the house’s accents. These can be anything from centrepieces to curtains and while there are many options, we have a few good ones for you. For colour schemes on things like couch covers, curtains, drapes, etc., try to go with pastel colours. Although for your living room, a darker scheme can be used in an Edwardian home. Gramophones and silver, with silver in mind go with picture frames and the like – all, of course, in silver.

Doors:

Edwardian door featuring glazing Don’t forget the interior doors of your Edwardian home to make sure they complement the walls and floors along with the furniture and accent items. While many internal Edwardian doors are solid panelled doors, usually with three panels, there are many that contained stained glass or regular glass inserts.  The doors are usually oak but there are also pine internal Edwardian doors that you can add to your Edwardian home as part of your refurbishment. Don't forget, your home will need an Edwardian style front door to complete the transformation process.  If you'd like help with your renovation project, call us now and we'll be happy to help you by providing a custom Edwardian front door for your property.