How Alexandra Tolstoy made a rental house her own | House & Garden

i found out that we could rent this house and the guy managing it told me that i had a gap of 10 days from the moment the old tenants moved out so in these 10 days i did absolutely everything that you can [Music] see [Music] i grew up first of all in somerset and then in oxfordshire my father is partly russian and my mother's completely english so i absorbed very much from both sides but when i was 18 the soviet union collapsed and my father suddenly said to me right this is it you're going to live in moscow for six months on your gap here and it was gray they were accused to buy either milk or bread but i completely fell in love with russia it was just something hugely magnetic for me i thought it changed the course of my life really i come from the tolstoy family and my father is the head of the wholesalesdo family it's a quite big family and he is the eldest of the eldest branch um and so leo is a distant cousin we have a common ancestor i think in the 18th century but it was a very unusual family in russia and that it was had an unusual number of artists writers ministers another one my favorite one he got his whole body tattooed from top to two and in the 18th century he walked from kamchatka on the east coast of russia all the way to saint petersburg and then married a gypsy and fought a jewel and was friends with pushkin i feel very lucky and proud to be part of that family so when we first came here the people who sort of came about oh well obviously this will be your sitting room because it's the bigger part of the of this room and it was my son who said to me no mommy it's much better that we have the table in the big part and then the sitting room is a really cozy little part these amazing curtains they're felt and really lovely and heavy but the most amazing thing about them is this border that all the illustrations of push against fairy tales as done by belieben who is a very famous illustrator they were embroidered patchwork i mean just truly works of art i love very earthy colors and for me the fireplace this was the perfect place for our icons we always want to have somewhere in the house which is a sort of central place since spiridon who's the tolstoy patron saint and he his remains are on kofu ivan where's yvonne gone oh here i bumped into a friend of mine she said i've got this dream to ride the silk road on horse and camel and i thought yes this is the thing and we spent nine months riding the silk road and during that time that's when i first rode through ferguson and it made a massive impact on me it was the place i wanted to return to the most these plates i've collected um they're russian made by this famous russian porcelain factory in the 19th century and you can see the coat of arms on them and then but they made them for the central asian market so they have this very asian uzbek feeling i just adore them none of them are the same i don't have any rules and i don't want rules really a lot of people told me don't have your dining room table here i don't believe in that stuff i just believe in what makes me and my children feel good this is a lovely spood plate and look at how great he looks with that so this amazing portrait by my friend craig hanna who's american and he did it when we lived in chelsea and obviously had a much bigger space to hang it in but obviously i'm not going to lose it here and i love that it's just kind of unabashed we've hung it in a small space and i'm holding my mother's my grandmother's russian doll which is actually on the fireplace over there this is actually swedish but it just immediately i loved it because obviously this color looks so good with the pimlico green so the photographs of the children are by edward mabelthorpe who's the brother of robert and he is very specific he only photographs them when they're one year old not younger not older and they're not allowed to be wearing anything and he has them in a studio and then i had to go out so i'm not even in there and he did one of them serious middle and smiling and he said to me at the time it's you know when they're older you'll look back and see all their characters then it's so true [Music] once i knew that this would be the sitting room we always see it's not that big so i knew that i wanted a sofa that really really maximized on the space i wanted it square i didn't want big arms and so this shape is from love your home is just absolutely perfect and i also wanted it in the same it's vulgar and the upholstery and it's the same as we had in our old house because it's just a really good background color for these and i kept these lovely chintz cushions we had because they're very special with the soldiers on this rug is from luke owen and i went through all luke's rugs and this was just the dream because it pulls out every single color that comes into this house we have a lot of this yellow ochre the red the blues and i feel that it's the kind of final glue which holds it all together this is an edit of my favorite parts from our old house this was in my son's bedroom and it just was a bit lost you know on a kind of high up shelf it's a victorian butcher's scene and then this was actually a christmas decoration it's the polish make them out of all sweet papers and i used to only get it out at christmas and i thought why just i'd love it and it looks sort of fun there [Music] for me the kitchen is absolutely the heart of my home i bake and i bake every single day this is an antique i just adore it um and it's really practical i think people have got stuck in a mindset if you have to have a fitter kitchen you don't have to have particles you don't have to fit a bathroom you don't have to you just need to obviously need a space to cook on to store stuff um and actually i think what can happen is when you have these hundreds of these covers they just fill up with rubbish really i love on instagram looking for antique dealers and i found an amazing guy in anglesey who i got that reclaimed ships like from the curtains all the curtains in the house all came from our old home and just resized them and from different places so they've kind of found new homes these were in our drawing room and now they're here and they're just really perfect so on the floor we ripped out this laminate and then there were these boards and they they're nice shape but they weren't very special color so i decided to paint them the same color as the woodwork this blue black and here i like it because i know i make a lot of coffees i bake a lot of cakes and i think the children probably get a lot of chocolate balls out of this cupboard um so it's particularly worn here and there where the dog goes out of the door so it's quite touching because it's sort of our story here i've collected as you can see lots of russian china so my method with ebay always involves the words antique and often involves the word russian and uh kuznetsov and gardner who are the names of the two famous porcelain factories and this i adore it's a shrine she makes shrines and it's got our auger in it so when i came here they had a bed like this going here um but i quickly realized if i did that i wouldn't have any storage and i had found this wonderful wardrobe that i wanted to have and i also love sleeping like that because my children often come down and it feels very welcoming because they come straight in but i've had a lot of people telling me oh it's bad feng shui you shouldn't be sleeping like that but again i think you just do you know what works for you rather than obeying some kind of rule so this chair was in my cottage so i think the patchwork must be 100 years old it's made in that way you know when it's not sewn it's kind of stuck but you must use things i don't want to have things like a museum so i don't mind that it's worn out a bit these cushions are what i sell on the tolstoy edit their russian roller fabric and um i adore them but i'd actually bought them and put them in my son's room and they kind of didn't really work there and then every night inevitably i had one child sleeping with me but they all kick me so this is the most perfect bolster cushion which we have under the duvet and i don't get kicked anymore these cushions i'd had from before these curtains i brought from he's called chad chap on instagram so the walls in here are light blue which is uh foreign balls like blue and i didn't do the blue black woodwork in here because i wanted to be more sort of light and more feminine really so on the walls well on this wall i've got the most amazing collection of these sailors valentines the story around them is that the sailors sent them to their valentines back in the 19th century as love tokens but actually i think these ones might be made in barbados where they were made by local women for sort of commercial souvenirs together with benedict and sj axelby we we've done this amazing collaboration for the tulsa edit to do contemporary versions of sailors valentines so this is my bathroom and actually i was very lucky with the structure because originally in this house this would have been another bedroom but they the owners had made it into a bathroom and it is the greatest luxury i just love this bathroom i love having their chair and i my daughter off another bath and i read her story these are old curtains from our other house this is by my friend natalie farm and farmer based on a russian motif so this cupboard i got from the tulsa is russian and it's very actually very unusual and rare to find russian furniture and this amazing the spanish russian company came to me and said we'd love to do a big drawing on your wall so what i asked them to do is they took motifs from this cupboard and i think it's worked so brutally they gave me a palette i chose the colours and every single one of these is hand painted and i absolutely love it i found scumble goosey and they make panels these are just panels and you nail and glue them on and the room just felt so much warmer and cozier so this is my middle son's room and it was sort of very obvious it would be his even though it's the biggest because he's the most active i hear him above my room and i hear a lot of thumping and jumping and he's got a lot of roots and different paraphernalia that he like and that in here it's amazing he's just got so much freedom in this room this is looking very tidy compared to normal this is an old school cupboard so i think i i got it for the color but i think it's rather appropriate it's all with all the books in it all the wall lamps i've used i had in our old house and then i got this flex from pookie and just did them externally because i don't i couldn't start you know going under the plaster and everything i got this antique patchwork from ebay and made a curtain and then got the handyman to make little these little shells for his lead soldiers this i got it's a chest but he loves chess and inside he's got all his hammers and nails and swiss army knives and things like that water balloons um and i've tried you know you can't crush your children and he's a very creative child he loves making things and i've really tried to give as much freedom as he possibly can have i wouldn't want a bigger house than this and if i bought this house what would i change and i would not change anything

Channel: House & Garden

Views: 742,421

Keywords: House, Garden, UK, Video, Magazine, Interior, Decorating, Gardening, British, Gardens, alexandra tolstoy, russian design, colour, pattern, traditional interiors, interiors ideas, interior design ideas, decorating inspiration, house tour, London house, victorian house, design ideas, rental house ideas, small home ideas, childrens room ideas

Id: U7QcPIJZ3Cc

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021