The Hollyhocks Room
Small space, big impact

The humble box room. Where once these oft maligned spaces were the dwelling of unused suitcases, last year’s Christmas decorations or a begrudging youngest child’s bedroom, since the pandemic, the box room has come into its own. Now a vital part of a home, these tiny rooms have been reimagined as offices, snugs and places of retreat.

And so House of Hackney founders Frieda and Javvy set about making the smallest room in their house into a bijou beauty.

Rather than shy away from bold prints and vibrant colour, as one might be tempted to in a small space, the couple embraced the modest size of the room and went all out with wall-to-wall florals. Naturally. 

The first thing Frieda and Javvy did when redesigning this room was choose a print, and they opted for a perennial favourite, HOLLYHOCKS, in ‘Spring’, one of House of Hackney’s best selling lines.

This cottagecore floral has a punk edge to stop it feeling saccharine, and depicts a riot of wildflowers in a rainbow of colours. For the walls, they commissioned a bespoke wallpaper, made from a scan of the HOLLYHOCKS linen fabric; this lends a tactile, softer and slightly muted feel to the print. Next came the main event; the incredible tented ceiling.

Swathes of HOLLYHOCKS viscose-linen were draped from the ceiling, meeting at a centre point of the flower-shaped GALANTHUS light. A canopy was installed over the bed, along with matching curtains forming a Georgian-style alcove bed, and a pointed pelmet flows around the entire room. Fabric is such a versatile design tool, and in this space it has been used to perfection, creating a dramatic yet relaxed impression, as if one is cocooned in a wildflower meadow.

To complement the print, the floor was covered in the leopard spots of our Axminster WILD CARD carpet, and the room was accessorised with a ‘Mallow’ pink FLORES mirror, a classic ANANAS pineapple lamp in neutral white and brass, and a vintage tabouret footstool, reupholstered in sumptuous HOLLYHOCKS velvet.

Finally, the bed was dressed in a HOLLYHOCKS valance and matching H Dawson eiderdown quilt, plumped with responsibly sourced British wool - just the thing for holing up in this new print paradise.

How to Create a Tented Room

To create the tented room, we split the space into 2 halves; the bed and then the rest of the room. 

The Bed Area

1. We built 2 shallow wooden boxes, the width of a curtain track and a bit deeper.
2. We then fixed curtain tracks inside each of the boxes and attached to the wall/ ceiling. This will be where the curtains hang either side of the bed. 
3. After this, we created pelmets from the HOLLYHOCKS fabric to hide the boxes.
4. We suspended a dowel in between the 2 boxes which we hung the fabric over, to create the pitched effect. The fabric can be fixed with nails or stapled to flat dowels attached to the walls.
5. We then attached the bunting all the way around to cover everything.

The Rest of the Room

1. For an area measuring 2m x 1.5m we used 6.5m metres of fabric, in 4 lengths. We sewed a channel on the top and bottom of each.
3. We then drew a cord through the top channels and gathered the fabric onto it.
4. Next we fixed the gathered fabric to the ceiling by securing behind a ceiling rose.
5. We then fixed 2 hooks onto each of the four walls where we wanted the tent to fall.
6. Then we inserted wooden dowels into the bottom channels on each of the four pieces of fabric, which rested on the corresponding hooks.
7. Finally, we attached bunting around the entire thing, hiding the screws and fittings.

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