Inside Tanya Burr's supremely liveable north London house

You’d think, with 4.2 million people regularly tuning in to her Instagram or YouTube channel to pick up tips on leading an aesthetically pleasing existence, a digital powerhouse like Tanya Burr might feel under pressure to keep them happy. If she does, she certainly doesn’t let it show. Here is a woman who knows what she likes and importantly, knows how to execute it. Her Instagram wall is awash with understated outfits, sunny climates and too-good-to-eat plates of food, and has been like this, largely unchanged, since she started her career in 2009, before influencing was really a thing. When she bought her “forever home”, she finally had the opportunity to implement the ideas she had been storing up for over a decade. The result is a distillation of everything she has learned about beauty. And ironically, it exists in a different realm to fleeting social media trends, achieving the much sought after “timeless” look.

“I am so new to this and haven’t got a clue what I am doing. But I feel like I am going to catch the renovation bug” she said, in her first renovation vlog, posted shortly after purchasing the house in August last year. She had been living in a house in west London which, unlike this one, was sadly lacking in anything that reflected its Victorian architecture. She was in need of more space to house her growing family (she has a two year old son, Sage) and a new project to sink her teeth into. “Top of my list was a place with original period features. I wanted fireplaces, cornicing and coving. This one had it all”, she says. Another pull was the house's floor plan. Unlike many she had seen, all of the main communal areas were on the ground floor, and thus benefited from masses of light. “The bones were good,” summarises Tanya.

This doesn’t mean the house was ready to go. Undoing questionable decorative decisions made by previous owners was Tanya’s first task. On a mission to strip the house back to its bones, carpets came up and underneath them, bright red paint was sanded off revealing impeccably preserved, original wooden floorboards. The fireplaces - unused for some time - were reinstated and the PVC windows (“I am allergic to PVC windows,” confesses Tanya) were replaced with Victorian-style paned glass ones reflective of the house’s architecture. On the upper three floors, an underused bathroom and bedroom became Tanya’s walk-in wardrobe and her partner Dan's office respectively, and the spare room next to the master bedroom was transformed into a bathroom, with the wall between the two knocked down.

“My style is classic and relaxed, and the house does lean into that”, she says. “I wanted it to feel warm, cosy and elegant. But also it needed to be practical”. A neutral palette of varying shades of warm white provide a backdrop for Tanya’s collection of furniture and art. Some pieces are vintage picked up from antique shops, Facebook Marketplace and Vinterior, some are inherited, and some bought new. “I am not a fan of trends”, she says. “I didn't want the house to obviously belong to any decorative era, and I think mixing period pieces with contemporary ones creates a subtle layering and gives the house harmony, but there’s nothing distinctly “trendy” about it”.