The best small spaces don’t just make room for good design—they celebrate it. Perfect English Small and Beautiful by Ros Byam Shaw is a love letter to the country’s compact yet characterful homes, where creativity and ingenuity take center stage. Through a series of twelve house tours, the book highlights the art of living well in less square footage, proving that thoughtful details and a strong sense of style can transform even the tiniest footprint into something extraordinary.
Take the kaleidoscopic world of Russell Loughlan’s Georgian townhouse in Deal, a coastal haven where every item has a story and every hue is deliberate. Loughlan, an artist-turned-decorator, has an eye for the overlooked—rescuing flea market treasures, reimagining found objects, and weaving them into a layered, lived-in aesthetic. We especially love his strategy for adding depth to small rooms with a monochromatic color palette: Work with a trio of shades ranging from light to dark, whether you’re tricking the eye upward with vertical stripes or simply differentiating the ceiling, millwork, and walls. Read on for a tour of his home—an excerpt from Perfect English Small and Beautiful by Ros Byam Shaw, published by Ryland Peters & Small.
Many of the period features from this early 18th-century house had been lost, but Loughlan found a pair of shutters on eBay rescued from a florist in France that exactly fitted the front window and painted a frame around the fireplace in lieu of a chimneypiece. He found the pair of antique French carpet chairs with their crocheted patches in a local shop, Will & Yates.
The fireplace at the dining end of the room has been tiled with antique manganese Delft tiles collected over a number of years. To its left is Loughlan’s ‘thrift corner’—all pieces found in charity shops, junk shops or on the street. The alabaster lamp base was unearthed in the basement when renovating.
A door under the stairs opens onto a second staircase down to the basement. The table and chapel chairs all came from Will & Yates, and the Japanese watercolor on silk was found in a local junk shop.
Walls in the kitchen and cloakroom are decorated with antique and vintage plates found in local charity shops. The work surfaces are African marble, and the glass light fitting was bought from Etsy and refurbished by a local company.
Loughlan says the bathroom was inspired by his ‘love affair with Portugal’. He found the mirrors in Lisbon and the antique pulled-thread tablecloth, which he has used as a curtain, at a flea market in Porto. The wall tiles are Mexican from Milagros London, and the floor is painted in Farrow & Ball Radicchio and Dimity, with woodwork in Serge.
A door in Farrow & Ball bright green Raw Tomatillo opens from the landing into the guest bedroom, with its mix of ice-cream colors and stripy walls, hand-painted by Loughlan in three different shades of Farrow & Ball pink: Templeton Pink, Setting Plaster, and Pink Ground. The IKEA four-poster bed, upcycled and painted, is covered in a plum-colored Welsh blanket from Will & Yates.
A BasShu quilt from Will & Yates was the starting point for the color scheme, with walls in Oval Room Blue, paneled ceiling in Light Blue and woodwork, fireplace and shutters in Sloe Blue, all Farrow & Ball Dead Flat.
