A bungalow with a taste for colour

The roof comes down almost to the tops of the windows. There is buff brick beneath it, a front door tucked into the shade and a birch leaning over the path. From the garden, you can see just enough of the sitting room to make out a red sofa. I like that small glimpse. A house needn't explain the whole of itself from the pavement.

For this Room Study, we have imagined a modest British bungalow with a generous front window and a kitchen that opens onto the back garden. Its pleasures are fairly close at hand. You can carry breakfast outside without negotiating a flight of stairs, or close a bedroom door and be properly away from the washing-up. The roof stays low. There is no new wing waiting just out of shot.

So much interiors imagery depends on something magnificent happening overhead. A double-height space does a considerable amount of the work before anyone has chosen a chair. Here, the interest comes from things at eye level: the timber around a doorway, the way a sofa sits beneath a picture, the glimpse of another colour further along the hall. Decorating has rather more responsibility in a house like this, which is part of the appeal.

Single-storey houses have a distinguished architectural life beyond the familiar suburban bungalow. At Perry House in Surrey, designed by Ernö Goldfinger in 1967–69, timber finishes and broad areas of glazing connect the principal rooms with a terrace. Historic England's listing also describes screens that allow parts of the interior to be separated. It is a much more elaborate house than ours, but that combination of openness and the ability to withdraw is worth paying attention to. A view through a house needn't mean seeing everything at once.

The front door opens into a proper hall. The bedroom is to the left, the sitting room to the right, with the kitchen further back and the bathroom reached independently from the passage. Nobody has to walk through a bedroom to find the loo. It is an ordinary arrangement, and an agreeable one to keep.

Apricot paint makes quite an entrance against the deep red dado. The lower gloss catches little broken reflections from the wall lights; above it, the matt colour settles around the pictures. A rust-coloured runner takes the centre of the oak floor. There is enough pattern here to forgive a pair of shoes left by the door, although there is also somewhere to tuck them away.

On the wall beside the bedroom, the pink figures in By Garmi's Dancing print keep the apricot company. It is a generous picture for a narrow space, best encountered as you pass rather than surveyed from a distance. Smaller drawings occupy the opposite wall. They needn't agree in subject or frame; the pleasure is in finding something different on the way back through.

The little ribbed-glass Davika lights keep the floor free. Their brass arms and clear shades are quite delicate against the red paint, and the light falls close to the wall. A shallow ledge beside the front door provides somewhere for keys without turning the passage into an obstacle course. There is no console table waiting to catch your hip on the way to the kitchen.

The sitting room begins with a rather fruity combination: coral walls and a wine-red sofa. There is enough pink in both colours to make them comfortable together, although the velvet has a depth that the painted wall lacks. Putting this sofa against white would produce a perfectly respectable room. Here, it looks as though someone has chosen the colour for the pleasure of sitting among it.

The Binky sofa supplied the furniture reference. Its back curves into the arms, with narrow vertical channels that catch the daylight, and its fine legs leave a little floor visible underneath. That matters here. The window is broad, the cabinet is long and the ceiling is low; another heavy rectangle would make the room feel rather boxed in. The sofa's curved ends interrupt those straight lines without demanding a much larger room around them.

There is a blackbird in the picture above it, amid a thicket of stems and leaves. This original garden illustration has the blunt marks of a woodcut. Its dark foliage gives the wall some bite. Outside, the planting can be untidy; inside, the picture makes room for a similar tangle. A very polished abstract in pink and burgundy would be an altogether tidier choice, and a less interesting one.

The sofa runs along the side wall, at right angles to the front window. The kitchen opening is on the adjoining rear wall, around the corner from the picture. A separate side door near the front window returns to the entrance hall. From the leather chair you can turn towards the garden or look through to the green room beyond. The low glass table keeps the striped rug in view and leaves the furniture's curved arms and thin legs doing most of the work.

A butterfly matchbox print gives the doorway a quite different companion. Its emphatic red wings and small yellow details have the cheerful bluntness of a label intended to be noticed. Hanging it beside the larger garden picture introduces another sort of drawing, with enough space between them for each to hold its own.

Along the opposite wall, oak storage takes on the less photogenic business of living here. Closed cupboards give the papers, spare cables and miscellaneous things somewhere to go. Books occupy the shelves above, with space for a red bowl and a pot whose rough surface catches the light. The joinery is conceived for the room. Its depth matters more than the arrangement of the shelves: a lovely cabinet that steals the route to the kitchen would soon become a nuisance.

The lamps make the colour more interesting. A slender Poise floor light stands by the chair, its globe floating above the heavy leather seat. Beside the sofa, the port-red Heath lamp has a fluted column and a cream shade edged in red. I like the slight formality of that small column. It gives the loose flowers and books something rather upright to sit beside.

Through the oak opening, the furniture becomes more workmanlike. Cupboards occupy the outside wall on the right, with a window above the steel sink. A round table takes the brighter corner on the left. The garden door is straight ahead. You can put down a mug, pull out a chair and still leave someone a route outside.

The green spreads across the cupboard fronts as well as the walls. Against it, little oxblood knobs have the agreeable sharpness of cherries. They pick up some of the sitting room's red, though the effect here is smaller and more casual. A handle is already something you see and touch several times a day; it can carry quite enough colour on its own.

Stainless steel gives the worktop a different temperament from the oak table. It catches a thin line of light along its edge and looks comfortable beside the sink, where there will inevitably be a wet cloth. I prefer it here with plain square tiles. The steel will show marks and scratches in use, which is a consideration to accept at the beginning, rather than a disappointment to discover later.

The Dinner Party print supplies the kitchen's excess. There are bottles, plates, playing cards and cats in a meal that seems unlikely to end promptly. It is a wonderfully busy thing to look at over a solitary piece of toast. The picture hangs on the dining wall, clear of the hob and sink, where its small incidents can be seen from a chair.

Above the table, the Bower pendant makes a much simpler shape. Its oyster-white cone has a crisp edge against the green, with the bulb visible underneath. The table gets its own pool of light without a large fitting filling the low ceiling. A glass vase in a black metal cradle lets the stems show through; the open structure is useful among all that solid timber.

The round table allows a chair to sit a little off-centre without making the room look out of order. A pedestal leaves the edges free of table legs, although the base still matters when you sit down. Before choosing one for an actual kitchen, I would mark the footprint on the floor and pull out a real chair. The clear route to the back door is worth more than an extra place setting that only fits on paper.

There is something particularly pleasant about a kitchen where the garden door is just an ordinary door. You can open it briefly to shake out a cloth, or leave it ajar while making lunch, without turning the whole rear of the house into an event. The terracotta floor and the planting beyond provide quite enough occasion.

The bedroom has butter-yellow walls and a glossy blackcurrant wardrobe. The fitted doors follow a straight wall, with a clear strip of floor in front of them. Their dark surface makes the yellow seem fuller, and the gloss gives the room something harder beside all the fabric. There is already plenty of quiet in the plain ceiling and pale curtains.

The striped headboard comes from the Sanja bed reference, with its straightforward timber frame and broad wooden footboard. The narrow lines bring a little order to the rumpled bedding. A green blanket lies across the foot, while a red edge on the pillows catches the colour of the bedside lamp. These are small enough gestures to change later. The stronger commitment is to the walls and wardrobe, which remain in view when the bed is stripped on a Saturday morning.

Two floral prints hang above the headboard. Autumnal Blooms has the generosity of a very full bunch; Floral Alchemy packs smaller flowers into a denser patch of colour. Their different sizes save the pair from looking like a hotel specification. The striped fabric underneath is orderly enough to take this little disturbance.

The mango-wood Dasai bedside table leaves an open shelf for a book, with a drawer for the things that should have stayed out of the picture. A second Heath lamp brings the sitting room's red column here. Repeating one light is enough to establish a family resemblance; the bedroom doesn't need the same rug, curtains and pictures as well.

A king-size bed would still have to earn its place in a real bungalow. Check its full frame dimensions, the door swing and the space needed to use the wardrobe. The yellow, dark gloss and fine stripe would work just as well around a smaller bed. None of the pleasure depends on squeezing in the largest one available.

The bathroom is reached from the hall, beyond the bedroom. Inside, the red becomes deeper and glossier. Oxblood tiles wrap the bath and climb to the window sill; above them, pale lilac makes a surprisingly gentle neighbour. A small chequerboard floor introduces another scale of pattern. The room can accommodate this much colour because the bath and basin remain plain white.

A timber-framed privacy window gives the bath daylight without offering the neighbours a view. The vanity sits along the side wall, with drawers below the basin and an illuminated oval mirror above. That long curve helps among the tile joints and the square edge of the cabinet. The mirror's light and the little globes alongside it let the basin end hold its own on a grey morning.

There is a mermaid in here, too. The Mermaid and the Moon print hangs on the drier wall near the entrance, comfortably away from the bath. Its green tail and ochre crescent make a small, rather pleasing interruption in the lilac. Works on paper need protection from humidity as well as direct splashes; in a persistently steamy room, I would keep this one in the hall and choose a suitable alternative for the bathroom.

The saffron towel supplies the sharpest colour. It hangs from a simple peg where a hand can find it, with a darker towel nearby. There is enough room for ordinary bottles and a soap dish, without making the edge of the bath perform as a display shelf. Lighting and fittings would need to be selected for the actual bathroom position by the installer; the pleasure of a red tiled bath does not depend on any particular tap or wall light.

Back in the sitting room, the window has gone blue and the little red lamp is making a much larger contribution. The velvet takes on a deeper colour. Light catches the rim of the glass table, and the blackbird loses some of its fine detail in the quieter part of the wall. The furniture has stayed put, but there is less competition from the garden.

This is where the low ceiling earns its keep. The lamp, picture and sofa belong to the same comfortable band of space; nothing asks you to look far above your head. I would leave the hall light on, take the chair by the books and let the washing-up wait until the chapter was finished.

Furniture, art and lighting selected for the house. The photographs below show the retailer references; check the chosen size, finish and what is included on the Shop page. The blackbird picture, smaller hall drawings and fitted joinery are original elements of the study, without Shop matches. We may earn commission through retailer links, at no extra cost to you.

Why the art shouldn’t match the cushions, One Victorian house, opened up, and Historic England’s listing for Perry House.