How to Furnish a Victorian Terrace: What to Keep, What to Update

Every Victorian terrace comes with two histories. There is the one the builder intended, with its front parlour kept for best and its coal fire in every room, and there is the one written by everyone who lived there since: the hardboard over the panelled doors, the gas fire bolted into the hearth, the swirly Artex someone thought was terribly modern in 1978. Furnishing a terrace well is mostly a matter of telling those two histories apart, then deciding which bits of each you want to live with.

Read the house before you buy a single cushion

Spend a few weeks simply looking. Victorian terraces follow a remarkably consistent plan: a narrow hall running past the front room, a back room behind it, and a long, thin kitchen in the rear extension that estate agents call the outrigger and everyone else calls the galley. Upstairs, the same footprint repeats, with the bathroom usually squeezed into the back bedroom over the kitchen at some point in the last century.

Then look up. Is the cornicing intact, or has it been patched with something plainer? Is there a ceiling rose, and is it original plaster or a polystyrene stand-in? Is there a picture rail, and at what height? These details tell you how grand the room was meant to be, and they should set the scale for everything you put in it. A front room with deep cornicing and a big rose was designed for a proper light fitting and a generous sofa; a modest back bedroom with a simple coving was not.

What to keep (and fight for)

Some features are worth protecting even when they are inconvenient, because they are expensive or impossible to replace convincingly and because they are the reason you bought a period house in the first place.

• Fireplaces and chimney breasts. Even if you never light a fire, a cast-iron insert with its tiled cheeks gives a room its centre. Removing a chimney breast also means structural work and paperwork, so the alcoves are usually better treated as an opportunity.
• Sash windows. Rattly sashes can almost always be overhauled: new cords, draught-stripping, a bit of careful joinery. Proper secondary glazing or slim double-glazed units in the original frames will see off most of the chill.
• Hall floor tiles. If you lift a carpet and find geometric or encaustic tiles, clean them gently and keep them. A few cracked ones can be matched by specialist suppliers.
• Four-panel doors, cornicing and roses. Strip paint carefully and slowly; a hundred years of emulsion can hide a lot of crisp detail.
• Floorboards. Pine boards are rarely perfect, but sanded and oiled, or simply painted, they suit the house better than most new flooring.

The house has already survived a hundred and thirty winters; it can survive your sofa.

What to update without a twinge of guilt

Victorians did not cook in fitted kitchens, wash in heated bathrooms or plug in a dozen devices before breakfast, so these are the rooms where modern life is entitled to win. A sleek kitchen in the outrigger, a walk-in shower, decent underfloor heating in the bathroom: none of it betrays the house, provided the rooms that carry the period character are left to do their job.

Lighting is the other area to modernise boldly. A single pendant in the middle of a tall room produces exactly the flat, cheerless light that makes period houses feel gloomy. Keep the central fitting for the ceiling rose, by all means, but add lamps at three heights: a floor lamp beside the sofa, table lamps on the alcove shelves, and something low on a side table. Plug-in wall lights are a renter-friendly way to cheat the effect.

The knocked-through room deserves a mention, too. Many terraces had the wall between front and back reception rooms removed decades ago. If yours has, you can reintroduce a sense of two zones with furniture rather than plaster: a rug and sofa at the front, a dining table at the back, and a pair of matching lights so the two halves feel related.

The alcove question

Built-in cupboards with shelves above are the classic answer for the alcoves either side of the chimney breast, and for good reason. They swallow the clutter, frame the fireplace and make a room look finished. Keep the cupboards a little shallower than the chimney breast so it still reads as the focal point, and paint them the wall colour for a calm, built-in look.

Furniture that suits the proportions

Terraces tend to have high ceilings and narrow rooms, which is a tricky combination. Long, low furniture can look lost under all that height, while a bulky corner sofa will swallow the floor. Look for pieces with legs, so you can see floor beneath them, and with a bit of height to the back. A traditional rolled-arm or tufted sofa sits beautifully against a period backdrop, but so does a clean-lined mid-century piece, as long as it is not too deep.

Curtains should hang from just below the cornice, not from the top of the window frame, and should puddle very slightly or kiss the floor. It makes the windows look taller and stops cold air sneaking in under the hem. In the bay, a curved pole or individual shutters both work; shutters are especially good in a street-facing front room where you want light without being watched by the bus queue.

Colour, pattern and the picture rail

The picture rail is your friend. Paint the wall below it in your main colour and the frieze above in the ceiling colour, and a lofty room instantly feels more intimate. Or reverse it in a small room and carry a deeper shade all the way to the ceiling for a cocooning effect. Our guide to the British paint palette has plenty of greens, greys and earthy pinks that sit happily against old plaster.

Pattern belongs in a terrace, whether it is a William Morris print on a single wall or a rug with a bit of history. If you are tempted, read our piece on wallpaper and Morris prints before you commit; a whole room of pattern is wonderful, but a chimney breast is a gentler start.

A quick checklist before anything goes in the skip

• Have you checked under carpets and lino for original boards or tiles?
• Is that boxed-in fireplace hiding an original surround?
• Could the old doors be stripped rather than replaced?
• Have you asked the neighbours what their houses still have? Terraces were built in batches, so the house next door is often the best reference you will find.
• Have you lived through one damp November in the house before deciding where the furniture goes?

That last point is not a joke. A terrace reveals itself slowly: where the afternoon sun lands, which wall gets cold, where you actually end up sitting with a cup of tea. Furnish for that house, not for the one in the estate agent's photographs, and you will end up with rooms that feel as though they have always been there.