EVERY DETAIL COUNTS

Fine craftsmanship, clever ideas and a surprising sense of fun fill this beautifully revived Victorian apartment in Edinburgh

- Judy Diamond

Figuring out what your client wants, understanding their tastes and knowing how far they’d like to be pushed out of their comfort zone is an art that any successful interior designer has to master. It’s tough enough to do when you can spend time together, leafing through samples and paint charts and discussing every detail of a project. But what if the client is on the other side of the Atlantic during a pandemic and hasn’t even set foot in the property they’ve commissioned you to refurbish?

That was the challenge facing Carley Kyle of Edinburgh’s Jeffreys Interiors as 2020 drew to a close. She got a call from a former client who lives in the city’s west end to say the flat above his was up for sale and his parents in America were considering buying it. Would she be interested in checking it out with a view to knocking it into shape?

“I went and took a look,” recalls the designer. “It was a first-floor apartment in a classic townhouse that had been divided up over the years. It had a lot of positives, but the layout wasn’t right for modern living, and even though the interiors had barely been touched and everything was original, it didn’t seem to have a lot of the character you’d expect in a property of this period.”

She recorded a video tour of the two bedrooms, bathroom, living room and very small kitchen and sent it, along with a few suggestions of how it could be improved, to America.