Interior design: How to make the most of your cloakroom

By Sonia Purnell 130PM GMT fifteen March 2010

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Previous of Images Next Making a matter a�striped cloakroom at a penthouse in Eaton Place written by Finchatton; and a distinguished mill palm dish by Symm and Anton (right) Photo CHRIS GASCOIGNE A splendid and ethereal cloakroom pattern from Antonia Stewart A normal cloakroom with coats and confusion Photo ALAMY

What does your loo contend about you? The answer is some-more than you think.

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Interior designers called in to skirt up houses find that some-more of a client"s celebrity is poured in to the cloakroom than any alternative piece of a home. Frequently they offer as a tabernacle to the owner. If the host unequivocally wants his or her guest to notice an award, esteem or achievement, the sitting room mantlepiece is nowhere nearby as in effect as the cloakroom wall.

"I have beheld that the downstairs loos of unwed people in their mid-thirties turn hard-core ego walls," reports Antonia Stewart, an interior engineer formed in west London. "What starts off with a integrate of photos of the 1st XI in red and white rugby shirts turns in to a enormous arrangement of the owners of the residence Lycra-clad using in the Marathon de Sable, or sailing the Atlantic single-handed. Boys are really worse than girls on this."

While this competence proportion to a manly peacock swelling the tail, Stewart finds it less shocking than cloakrooms piled high with smutty fun books or old caricatures of sharpened and fishing. "I don"t mind them in my parents" friends" houses, but I would never put them in a client"s or friend"s house."

Clients with critical income have an picture they instruct to project. A immature landowner in one of the smartest streets in Notting Hill, for instance, is obviously perplexing to plead any suggestions that his function creates him a fly-by-night opportunist. His cloakroom is all steel and stone, as if denoting reduction and permanence, with only a single, beautiful candlestick maybe to paint his softer side.

Meanwhile, an additional interior designer, Katrina Phillips, was commissioned to have a "happy" cloakroom by an additional landowner and his amicable anthropologist wife, whose nerve-racking work involves assisting disadvantaged children. "She longed for the cloakroom to feel sparkly and fortifying after a tough day. So I"ve put in a chainmail rather than a clear chandelier, and commissioned a horsehair blind with a stimulating lead thread woven by it. The wallpaper, from Brian Yates, is additionally lead so that in conclusion rather than showy, the room feels really healing, intense and calm."

Not qualities you join forces with with the normal banker, but a clarity of healing is a usual thesis in some-more successful cloakrooms. Good soap, soft towels, pattern and even delicately selected books regularly go down well and indicate observance and maybe a acquire spirit that we competence only be a small well-bred ourselves.

And who would have thought your shower paper could verbalise volumes about you? It"s not only Simon Cowell"s black loo hurl at �10 a hurl that is a no-no. "Always have a basket full of loo rolls," Phillips advises. "Just one hurl does not see inexhaustible and could even have you see rather mean."

The cloakroom is additionally the place for revolting opposite the rest of the residence a entirely manly cover of timber and staid colours, in a domicile dominated by women and pastels. In my male-dominated home strewn with footballs, fondle guns and unwashed socks, I have managed to get afar with a entirely girlie cloakroom coated in silver-leaf with mini-chandelier and Seventies disco round and mirrored make-up box and a shelf of perfumes. So what if my guest think me of an vulgar emotional for a some-more glamorous youth; it creates me grin each time I go in there.

We only have the one cloakroom the distance of a sideboard underneath the steps in a London patio house. But for loyal cloakroom power, the direction right away in some-more atmospheric homes is to implement dual one off the kitchen and the alternative permitted from the hall. The kitchen one is about family cosy, charming and with snaps of the children. While the alternative is the worldly one with mill and metallics and the place you approach any one you instruct to impress. Here, small will not do. "Push the roof tallness as far as you can, make use of floating self-centredness units to emanate an sense of expanse and implement discriminating nickel taps, that see really smart," advises Saskia Blyth, pattern executive of the upmarket developers Finchatton.

So if you can"t means one of their properties, you can at slightest obey a banker-bonus cloakroom.

Contacts Brian Yates wallpapers 020 7352 0123, www.brian-yates.co.uk; Katrina Phillips 020 7229 1963, www.katrinaphillipsinteriors.com; Antonia Stewart 020 7386 0110, antoniastewart.com