We knew we wanted a project, and our very knowledgeable friend helped guide us towards some of the better opportunities – for example our street is one of the very few which has a bay window in the kitchen as well as at the front.  We didn’t want anywhere where internal walls had been knocked down, and as keen cooks, wanted a dining kitchen. We wanted somewhere ‘with potential.’

We are rather unusual in that the majority of people around Shawlands are young first-time buyers or renting. So generally speaking, not a lot of money is spent on them. We stumbled on this attitude very early on, when a kitchen fitter tried to encourage us to build a fake wall across the bed recess to make it easier for the standard size kitchen units to fit. He tutted at our love of the curved walls and wonky alcove. We didn’t use his services. A well-meaning neighbour came for a look and declared that there was no point in doing what we were planning because ‘you’ll never get the money back.’

All the major work was completed while we were still living in Cardiff. Clearing and selling our house alternated with weeks of concentrated effort, getting covered in plaster dust, exhausting ourselves with stripping off layer after layer of wallpaper, thick gloss paint and botched DIY jobs. There were some pleasant surprises –

the original front door was in good condition behind a plywood panel and the original clockwork bell mechanism just needed cleaning to make it work again.

The orange pine and glass shelves in the sitting room were easy enough to remove so we could reinstate an authentic-looking press using antique glass doors given to us as a housewarming present. Other discoveries were more frustrating – a high cupboard built for no apparent purpose in the hall had been fitted by hacking off chunks of coving and pulling off one side of door architrave. When we ripped out the kitchen units in front of the bay window, we discovered that pieces of window frame were missing.  They’d been chopped off to save the bother of fitting kitchen worktop around them.

Our intention was to combine the best bits of the flat’s heritage with some twenty first century touches so it didn’t feel as though we were living in a museum. 

We had lengthy discussions about the doors, which were orange pine with glass panels. Sourcing original 5-panel doors was clearly going to be a huge challenge – Glasgow Reclamation informed us that they rarely got hold of any the right size, so the chances of getting a set were pretty low. We came to the conclusion that changes like that were part of the flat’s life and we were OK with it. So I painted them instead, and with some beautiful antique doorknobs on them, they look great.

We were very glad when Neil from Clydebuilt joinery, who built the new press, mentioned Express Timber Mouldings in Paisley as a possible source of the old patterns for architraves.  Being new to Glasgow, we had very few contacts and our knowledge base was zero. We trotted down there with a chunk of door surround, left it there for them to look at and within an hour had a call to say they had the original cutters and could easily run some more up to match our existing material at a very reasonable cost.

Of course it wasn’t always straightforward – the boiler got condemned and the microbore pipework needed to be replaced. That meant a whole new central heating system, more damage to the floorboards and endless discussions about the boiler. It was located in full view of the doorway into the kitchen. I was not happy about it staying there. We agreed to get it moved into the utility room out of the way. But new gas safety standards put paid to that – our original fitter made a mistake with the measurements and we were told we either had to seal up the windows to give the necessary air gap or leave the boiler where it was.  Tears were shed. Then the wonderful Mike at Glenlith Interiors came up with a genius idea. He designed a combined cupboard/doorway assembly which hid the boiler (and gave us storage space underneath) and gave us a new door into the utility room which remains one of the highlights of the kitchen!

Once we had engaged Mike Cunningham, the kitchen was plain sailing. He really ‘got’ what we wanted to do – a kitchen that had a heritage feel to it, with units that felt a little like furniture as this would be a dining room as well. We also wanted to use every scrap of space, so bespoke was the way to go. With a very keen cook in the family, we also wanted high-end equipment. A combi steam oven and space-age cooker hood were therefore given pride of place.

The bathroom is the only unashamedly modern room in the flat, but even there we tried to retain some sense of its history by mounting the tiles vertically to give a look of tongue-and-groove.  We needed a practical space for rinsing dive kit so when JP from Coiremanich tiling arrived and pronounced that we needed to get rid of the bath and turn the whole area into a wetroom, we were sold!

With the ‘bones’ completed, we could start to look at decorating. While I am willing to tackle most things, I wasn’t so confident about the colour scheme. I’d bought some curtain fabric on eBay and had a rough idea of the sort of look I was after. The person to bring it together was Anna, the colour consultant from Farrow and Ball, who gave us so many ideas and encouraged us to be braver with colours than we might otherwise have been.

Many packets of Polyfilla and rolls of lining paper later, and I finally had wall surfaces that were fit to be painted.  The colours really brought everything together and created a cohesive look, which I wanted considering you can stand in the hall and see into all the rooms at the same time. The last task was to make all the curtains and blinds. I found vintage William Morris and Sanderson on eBay, blind fabric in Remnant Kings, and finally it was all done. Not without a fair amount of swearing and unpicking when the curtains didn’t want to hang properly, but I got there.

The finished flat is exactly what we’d hoped for and more. From being a base to explore from, with Covid-19 lockdown, it turned into our safe little nest. It continues to repay the time and effort we put in and I can’t see us wanting to leave here for a very long time.

Sarah Bowen,

Bellwood Street

Guest Blog

Read our post on the history and design of Southside tenements.

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