Los Angeles-based designer Olivia Williams updates a classic Notting Hilltown house for a young family.
Once upon a time, there was a house that had seen better days. Back in the middle of the 19th century, it had been constructed as a private residence in Notting Hill, one of London's prettiest neighborhoods. By the 1920s, it had come down in the world, reconstituted into a "ladies' residential club" (read: boarding house for women), and then, after the Second World War, it had become a hotel. The hotel was eventually divided into apartments, one occupied by a young magician advertising for a beautiful assistant. Today, a different type of sorcery-aesthetic, architectural, familial-has brought it to domestic life again, a life ringing with lessons taken on an upright piano in the dining room, board games in the living room, and four lively children dashing in and out of the garden.
