A colourful and sophisticated terraced house in Chelsea by Studio Duggan

Victorian terraces – despite their uniformity – can be tricky spaces to decorate. How do you make it functional, using all of the sometimes limited space and light, whilst also creating a sense of individuality? These are the questions that the owners of this five-floor, four-bedroom house in Chelsea asked themselves when they first bought it in 2021. The solution? To enlist the help of interior designer Tiffany Duggan, whose sophisticated interiors, always a little playful, they had long admired on Instagram.

Since launching Studio Duggan in 2012, Tiffany has made a name for herself as an interior designer who consistently creates polished, fun and deeply inviting spaces. She spent the years prior honing her eye as a scenic artist for the theatre, where she learned the refined, exciting sense of style that she also brings to her furniture line, Trove, which launched in 2019.

Structurally the house was in good order. Tiffany’s challenge was to introduce an identity – one which reflected both halves of the couple. She loved colour and pattern, and he favoured clean-lined, contemporary design: ‘One of our jobs as interior designers when working with a couple, is to find where their tastes overlap’, she says. Here, this meant a delicate balancing act of colour, mid-century pieces, and pattern interspersed with neutrals. The couple owned very few pieces of furniture, so Tiffany brought in most of the pieces currently in the house.

The hallway – which has already received something of a fanatical reaction on Instagram – was kept relatively simple, ‘relatively’ being the operative word, as the eye can still be drawn in several directions, but compared with much of the rest of the house, it’s a visual oasis. ‘There wasn’t the space for us to pack it with furniture – we wanted to keep it quite light,’ says Tiffany, who mixed a natural Phillip Jeffries reeded wallcovering with light, white furniture and lighting with a marble chequerboard floor. ‘It’s warm but neutral,’ she says. The skirting board, painted in 'Castle Grey' by Farrow & Ball, acts as a link to the rest of the house, where shades of light blue are a running thread.

On the ground floor, the double reception room, which ‘makes it sound much grander than its dinky proportions would suggest’ was the biggest challenge. ‘What to do with the dreaded middle reception room?’ asks Tiffany. The street-facing side, designed for entertaining, was packed with seating: some, like the Rose Uniacke sofa or the mohair armchairs in lime green, from Trove, were contemporary finds, while the 1970s coffee table is a nod towards the mid-century design much loved by the husband. The middle room is quieter – just one reading chair and a coat cupboard, into which all manner of a young family’s clutter can be easily tidied away.