Picture the scene: your house is bursting at the seams, your soon-to-be teenage children need rooms of their own, and you urgently need a home office for your newly launched business. Then your architect suggests using precious space for a country-house-style hall, empty save for one central table. On paper it sounds mad, but walking into the hall of this 1850s London terrace house with its owner, Henrietta Courtauld one half of The Land Gardeners one can see the logic behind that suggestion. The architect in question is Maria Speake, one of the founders of architectural salvage and design company Retrouvius. As she says, 'Families need space, but also breathing space', and the new hall has just that.

'Between the hall and the children's floor, we took the place apart,' Maria says. 'Clients are anxious about moving things structurally, but often it is the easiest thing to do, and financially it is not a big deal. You can spend a fortune on cupboards, but a few good bits of steel can create the most dramatic change.' And the dramatic change she made was to get rid of the original staircase and replace it with this slim one on a side wall, opening out the space that is now the hall. The space also includes a wall of storage and a bookshelf.