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An affair of the heart : In the guest bathroom, Dulux's Forest Black creates a moody atmosphere simultaneously offsetting Tanya's collection of ornate mirrors. -
An affair of the heart : The light-filled conservatory-style en-suite bathroom features a traditional old ball-and-claw Victorian bath. Rustic fawn-colored walls lend an aged, lived-in look. -
An affair of the heart : The geisha's okiya meets Marie Antoinette's boudoir in this bathroom still-life, where eastern screens flank the tattered elegance of the 18th-century-style deep-buttoned armchair. -
An affair of the heart : A cornucopia of treasured finds, the living room is an eclectic mix of old and new, as well as seemingly incongruous genres. Plush scarlet Draylon on the sofa picks up the fuchsia-coloured upholstery, a Silk & Cotton Co. print, on the 40s-style chair. -
An affair of the heart : A large Kevin Makintosh print (from his Bolshoi collection) dominates the master bedroom, where taupe walls and soft furnishingslend an opulent yet intimate air. The linen curtain that backdrops the bed cleverly conceals a former doorframe. -
An affair of the heart : Rch purple velvet curtains lined with red pompom tassels lend a theatrical touch to the otherwise country-style kitchen, where everyday dinnerware and cooking utensils are transformed into objects of beauty. -
An affair of the heart : Tanya's display of cutlery and everyday objects in the dining room attest to her love of "celebrating the ordinary". -
An affair of the heart : Traditional white broekie lace is given a rust-oxidated effect with specially mixed putty-coloured paint from Dulux on the front patio, tabby Tazna's favourite haunt. The zinc furniture was bought in Belgium and the oversized floral jars in Indonesia.
PHOTOS: David Snyders | PRODUCTION: Sumien Brink | WORDS: Jocelyn Warrington
It was a case of love at first sight – and in many ways a triumph of imagination over common sense – when interior designer Tanya Sturgeon first set eyes on this diminutive Victorian villa.
It was Plato who said that, at the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. Certainly, there is an intrinsic poetry to the lyricism with which interior designer Tanya Sturgeon has furnished and decorated her new Cape Town home.
The way in which each unique piece retains its individual voice while singing in harmony with the others is an ode, if you will, to Tanya’s intense – albeit shotgun – love affair with the adorable Victorian property.
It took just three weeks for the fabric designer turned decor emporium owner to settle herself into her new nest in Tamboerskloof. “The previous owners dropped in to see it shortly after I’d moved in and couldn’t believe its transformation,” she says, admitting that the impetus for the speed of her move was born partly out of a previously ill-judged choice of lodgings.
“I’d transferred from Johannesburg into a house in Cape Town’s southern suburbs that didn’t suit my lifestyle, personality, or my stuff, for that matter.” The duress of commuting each day to the City Bowl where, together with her niece Amanda Fellows, Tanya owns interior design and decor showroom T&Co, eventually impelled her to find a tenant for the still-new house.
With the day of reoccupation looming and nowhere to go, Tanya packed her treasured belongings into storage boxes and found refuge with fellow style devotee Gail Behr.
A perfect match
However, when, a few months later, she spotted the quaint restored villa in one of the city’s oldest residential suburbs, its archetypal lofty ceilings and broekie-laced terrace were seduction enough and its purchase was swiftly sealed within three days.
A month later and Tanya is fully installed in her new home, walls painted and pictures hung, furnishings retrieved from boxes and collectibles lovingly restored to their rightful places as part of a series of considered still-lifes on tabletops and in existing alcoves seemingly purpose-built for their exclusive repose.
In retrospect, a smitten Tanya describes the process as nothing short of a passionate love affair. On days when, she sheepishly admits, she should have been scouring auction rooms and antiques repositories for unique one-offs with which to fill her high-end interiors store, she was, instead, locked in infatuated embrace with her new home, tenderly embroidering its canvas with a unique stamp grounded on a highly attuned design sensibility and years in the fabrics and decor industry.
“Decorating is, at its heart, a process of layering, a way of putting things together that work compositionally and that create spaces with depth, authenticity and visual interest,” says Tanya, whose trademark shaded chandeliers and bountiful soft furnishings attest to her love of embellishment. “Lampshades and scatter cushions are like jewellery or a pair of really good heels – they complete the outfit.”
An unashamed marriage of old and new, and seemingly incongruous genres, is another signature of Tanya’s style. “It’s like a painting,” she says. “One doesn’t ask if blue and red go together but rather ‘Are they tonally harmonious, how much of each has been used, have they been combined with the same artistic sensibility?’”
A visual feast
Unsurprisingly, Tanya’s own home is a theatrical mix of patterned fuchsia, plush crimson Draylon, amethyst, sapphire and bottle-green velvet and shimmering taupe silk and linen, all brought into tonal concord by an inky charcoal backdrop in some places and a steely grey in others.
Paintings, prints and photographs – from a Kentridge iris in the dining room to niece Emily Fellows’s dry-brush landscapes in the passage and Beezy Bailey’s charcoal portrait of Tanya’s son, Daniel, in the bedroom – adorn the walls in a riotous profusion of colour and styles.
Accessories, many admittedly plundered from her shop but all with sentimentality beyond price, consort happily on tabletops and in glass-fronted cabinets.
In the conservatory-style main bathroom, a handsome freestanding ball-and-claw Victorian bath is perfectly at home with a Marie Antoinette trench armchair, itself dressed in the homespun gorgeousness of what resembles a frayed corset.
In the bay-fronted dining room, meanwhile, armloads of rustically tarnished cutlery stand to attention in zinc buckets on the slim, dark-stained table, around which is assembled a consortium of mismatched chairs, precisely perfect in their imperfection.
While all appears flawlessly – if not slightly quirkily – styled, Tanya admits she hasn’t yet stopped playing. “The dining and living rooms have already been entirely repositioned and I’m still moving bits about, adding here, taking away there.”
But then, so the saying goes, in the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing. Certainly, in this equation, the formula for success lies entirely in the instinct of the heart.
• T&Co.: Unit 78, Victoria Junction (entrance Ebenezer Road), Green Point, Cape Town, 087 808 7064/5, www.tandco.co.za
