The renovation of a family home can be many things — dusty, stressful and logistically challenging among them. It is rarely fun. Yet that is how interior designer Tanya Selway remembers the transformation of her home in Chiswick, west London, when she was a child.
“When I was growing up, we were constantly living in a building site. My parents sort of built that house over 15 years,” she says. “One morning, I came downstairs and my dad had blocked off the back of the house because they’d taken the wall down.” Her father, an artist, transformed the exposed chipboard into an entire garden mural, creating what Selway describes as being “like the backdrop of a stage”.
This playful, painterly approach to domestic spaces would become the blueprint for her own design philosophy years later. “I often think about that and how magical it was for us as kids,” she says. “It was like being in some sort of story.”
We’re talking in the kitchen of her recently renovated home, not far from where she grew up. “This house is a love letter to my childhood,” she says of the Edwardian red-brick end-of-terrace, “in the ways that we use the space, and also the materials and how I just emotionally connect with it.” Here, materials from her family’s past have transformed what was a pleasant but dated property; it is a testament to her father’s lesson that a house is not just a structure, but a space for personal expression.
Selway studied fine art at Brighton University, specialising in painting. Having moved to Los Angeles in 2013 with her husband Jamie, a sound mixer for film and television, she began her design career working on the homes of high-profile clients in the entertainment industry. Returning to London during the pandemic, she co-founded Stelly Selway with business partner Benjamin Stelly, now working across the UK, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas.
Where designing for clients is a carefully choreographed dance of restraint and strategic creativity, often involving conservative colour palettes and safer material choices, Selway’s approach to her own home has been radically different. “I could really explore my own emotional connections to design,” she says. Here, bold colours, unconventional materials collected during warehouse clear-outs or saved from her parents’ old house, and personal artefacts are key.
At the heart of Selway’s home is the kitchen that she has transformed from a tight galley space into a social hub by extending 3 metres into the garden — the maximum allowed without permits. “We love hosting,” she says. “It has to be really sociable. We wanted to be able to host 25 people at Christmas.” The extension was designed to feel seamless, incorporating an antique ceiling rose and joinery in American cherry that runs along the entire wall to create a sense of connection.
For the kitchen units, stainless steel connects the vivid Red Jasper marble countertops with the floor’s muted terracotta tiles, selected for their 1960s aesthetic and their tactile warmth when combined with the underfloor heating. In the dining area, leather fronts to the cabinets were custom crafted from offcuts from previous projects.
“We’d wanted to do leather-fronted cabinets in clients’ properties, and they were not brave enough, they just didn’t think they were durable,” Selway says. “Now I can legitimately say ‘It’s fine, I have them in my own home!’”
Colour choices are deliberately counterintuitive, the sitting room walls are painted in Farrow & Ball’s India Yellow, while the master en suite is a bright sky blue that Selway chose to challenge her husband’s initial choice of Farrow & Ball’s muted grey-brown Mouse’s Back. Without the budget of many of her clients, Selway was strategic in mixing high and low-end pieces. Particularly striking is the combination of vintage lighting, leopard-print fabrics (including on the stairs) and personal artworks.
The redesign has also sparked new creative collaborations. Dangling above the kitchen island are two ceramic head pendants by artist Annelie Fawke, who also painted a whimsical custom mural of hands, legs and eyes in the downstairs loo. The heads gently rotate, seeming to talk to each other or turn away, and are complemented by small ceramic wall lights on the ground floor. Since then, Fawke has produced similar lighting pieces on a larger scale for a Stelly Selway-designed Los Angeles restaurant.
Upstairs, her six-year-old daughter Althea’s room features a playful mural inspired by a theatrical backdrop, while eight-year-old Mila’s bedroom next door has large-scale hand-painted flowers paired with vintage pieces, such as a bureau from Selway’s parents’ house and a “princess chair” from vintage design dealer Scene by Chloe. The headboards are constructed from more leather and suede remnants; cushions are covered in fabric left over from Selway’s mother’s wedding outfit from the 1970s.
In the newly extended loft space is the master bedroom. “It is my haven,” says Selway. Here, the room has been designed to capture the changing light throughout the day. Sunrise is visible from bed through the roof lights, while strategically placed fan lights allow the setting sun to filter through the en-suite bathroom, creating a golden glow in the early evening.
The focus of the room, however, is a freestanding roll-top bath. “Whenever we’d stay in hotels, I’m like, ‘I want a bath in our room’ — that, to me, is pure luxury,” she explains. The bath — a Facebook Marketplace find — is surrounded by tiles that pay homage to her parents’ own 1980s bathroom.
“Our house was awash with colour and bold choices — and they had such an Eighties bathroom, completely tiled, floor to ceiling, in this verde marble. My mum had one box left and before we even started doing this house I knew I needed to incorporate it somewhere.”
“People will think, ‘She’s obsessed with her parents!,’” she laughs. “I’m not. I just had a very lovely childhood, and was very fortunate that my dad was so creative.”
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