Anyone who has grown up in, visited or owns a Victorian terraced house in the UK knows exactly what the ‘middle room’ is and why it presents such a problem. These houses were originally designed to have a L-shaped plan, narrowing at the back, so that these ‘middle’ rooms would actually have looked out onto the back garden, and often would have functioned as a dining room or sitting room. These days, however, most houses of this shape have been extended at the back to create larger kitchens, and this has meant removing windows from the room in the middle, which is now sandwiched between the front room and the extension.
‘Middle’ rooms are now definitively part of our lives, so what are the best things to do with them? “Tacitus famously was of the opinion that it's best sometimes not to expect too much,” interior designer Benedict Foley explains, “and while it might seem roundabout to start with a 1st century Roman author when thinking about a typical London terrace plan, it is something I often think about with interiors. If you accept that a front room plus middle room is never going to be that large open reception room you counted on when you moved in, then it's easier to see the opportunity!”
In my own childhood house, the middle room serves both as my mum's office and now also my son's playroom when he visits, but the architectural interventions made by the previous owners are rather clever. When extending the kitchen at the back of the house, they left or added a window in what would have been the external wall, alongside glass-paned French doors which flow into the space, meaning the middle room is flooded with light from the kitchen (which itself has lots of windows so gets a ton of daylight). Polly Ashman has done something similar but in a more modern way in a west London family home, turning the middle room into a TV snug but keeping it light and bright with internal windows out to the hallway, as well as a double width arch into the front living room. It's a clever idea, creating not just a functional space but removing the need for a TV in the living room so that can be more of a formal entertaining space as well as somewhere to read and relax.
Polly says of such spaces, “whatever its function, define it and create the interiors around it” otherwise it will tend to become “a makeshift storage room with no real purpose”. As well as considering “an internal window or glazed doors,” Polly also advises people to “think about layered lighting; ceiling lights, wall lights and lamps” as these rooms are darker due to the lack of natural light. She also emphasises how important it is to make sure the middle room links to the other rooms on the ground floor, so in the TV snug she created for this family, the flooring is seamless from living room to snug, allowing a sense of the same space but with distinct uses.
For Charlotte Buchanan, one half of husband-wife interior design team Buchanan Studios, “a common problem families have in particular in Edwardian or Victorian houses with this layout, is that this middle room ends up becoming the children's playroom. It's also a room you walk through and see all the time, so it's a challenge of how to have a fun playroom for the children but also make a beautiful space.” To combat this in their own house, Charlotte and her husband Angus designed an ottoman that sits in the middle of the room and works on many levels; it has storage underneath for all the toys (hidden by the loose cover) and acts as somewhere to perch of an evening with a drink. Charmingly, it has separate covers for day and night: its child-friendly daytime cover is made up in hardwearing corduroy, while its fancier nighttime cover is done in their own floral ticking fabric. Polly is fully on board with the smart storage solutions in a middle room, adding “as you typically don't have much space in this room fitted joinery is a great option. This can house anything from a TV to books and children's toys.”
On the flip side, the other thing to do with a middle room is lean into its difficulties and design it deliberately to be a less-used space. In her own house in Shepherd's Bush, interior designer Charlotte Boundy wanted the space to function as a hallway, so it is sparingly decorated with a George III corner cupboard from Ron Green, a George III octagonal tripod table from Robert Kime and an 18th-century Aubusson verdure tapestry from Joshua Lumley. There's no use for the room in the sense of as a dining room, study or snug but it functions as a lovely thoroughfare.
In a similar vein, Benedict didn't make too much of the middle room when conceptualising Max Hurd's house (pictured top), though he did go large on the decoration. “With Max's house I knew the narrow space wasn't going to give anyone joy as a full sitting room,” he details, “but it was needed as a circulation space, an alternate route to the kitchen and dining room without heading along the narrow corridor past the stairs. We termed the space ‘the drawing room’, precisely because its size was anything but – the space does however perform the same function as that lesser-used room. A sofa to read a book on, a smattering of side chairs that can be pulled up for guests to perch on, a drinks table that serves the two rooms either way for parties. We didn't hold back on colour or decoration, and so whilst the room itself didn't offer much in the way of floor space, the visuals move it from prosaic to cocktail.”
How you tackle a ‘middle room’ depends entirely on your lifestyle. If there are children in the house, the transitional snug/playroom that Polly Ashman and Charlotte Buchanan have chosen can be immensely useful, but if you have more freedom to use spaces as you wish, we rather like the idea of indulging in a space that doesn't really need to have a firm function – it's rather a luxury in an urban house after all. Whatever you choose to use it for, let Benedict's final words echo in your mind: “this is really where design can be at its best, solving a problem and having fun doing it!”
