Desig House: Real Homes: A Victorian Terraced House in London

Tasked with reconciling twenty-first century living with the Victorian proportions of this terrace house, the interior designer Sarah Stewart-Smith reconfigured the ground floor and linked the spaces with modern textures and pristine finishes

The terrace on which this house stands in west London offers one of the city's prettiest sights on a fine spring morning, as billows of snowy cherry blossom vie with the white stucco of the mid-nineteenth-century houses. When it was newly built, the lady of the house would have sat in a crinoline, being waited on by servants in a formal drawing room. Her modern equivalent, however, wants to live in an easy, casual way, wearing Lycra gym gear and almost certainly opening her own front door. Yet when the interior designer Sarah Stewart-Smith was called in by the current owners, the layout of the house still seemed more fitted to its original inhabitants. Sarah was tasked with bringing the house into the twenty-first century.

'We hardly used the dining room,' says the owner, a photographer, who has lived here with her husband and children for 24 years. Now grown up, the three children have almost all flown the nest. 'There was a circuitous route for getting to the kitchen at the back of the house,' says Sarah. 'This is a tall, thin house and the initial brief was about making daily life work for the two of them on one floor.' With the help of architects Jeff Kahane + Associates, she has reconfigured the three ground-floor rooms.

They moved the kitchen to the front, where the barely used dining room had been. The middle room, another underused space, had an arched opening that connected it to the hall and a window with a Juliet balcony looking onto the basement light well, but it had no proper purpose. This was to be the new dining room. They squared off its arched opening, so the height matched that of the newly enlarged opening to the kitchen, which has pocket doors concealed within the wall space. When its round table is not set for dinner, the room looks like a modern version of a formal hall in a grand country house.

At the back of the house, the kitchen was transformed into a cosy sitting room, or 'snug', overlooking the garden. The three ground-floor rooms now each had a new purpose, but it was the next step that really made the difference. Sarah and Jeff introduced a short corridor, with glass walls and roof, on a mini bridge that spanned half the light well, to connect the ground-floor rooms. You could now look from the kitchen at the front through to the dining area and snug at the back. And, thanks to this new glass-lined link, it is only a few steps from one to the other, which solves the feeling of isolation you would previously have had in the kitchen and how closed off the rooms were from each other.

Sarah's next move was to unify all these spaces visually, while respecting the framework and details of the original Victorian house. When you walk through the front door, you see white plaster cornices and the black-painted wrought-iron balusters of the stairs. These and the black-and-white photographs taken by the owner on the walls inspired the monochrome colour scheme, with Sarah placing particular emphasis on textures and perfection of finish. The floor of the hall and dining room are in a veined black marble, while the snug and kitchen floors are made from wide boards of charcoal-coloured oak. The floor of the glass corridor is in charcoal leather. 'Where the leather, glass and wood meet, the joins are utterly perfect,' Sarah says. 'And they have to be, if you are to pull off a modern interior in a classical stucco-fronted house. Nothing must jar; everything must look intentional.'

The Bulthaup kitchen cabinets have been stained a dark charcoal shade, and the worktop on the raised island, which is used for dining, is made of a massive chunk of swirling Bianco Fantastico marble chosen by the owner. 'Then I got cold feet,' she admits, 'but Sarah convinced me to stick with the strong choice. I'm so pleased I did.'

Embedded in the wall of the corridor is a huge lightbox image by the photographer Dede Johnston, showing superimposed details of a birch forest and branches of leaves. The image is projected onto the glass wall opposite - as you walk through, it is as if an installation meets a walk in the forest. Things are simpler in the snug, where comfortable, custom-made L-shape seating stands in front of a spectacular sliding glass wall by Trombé, looking out onto the garden, which was designed by Robert Budwig.

The project for the ground floor was almost ready to roll, with builders primed, when the owners - impressed by Sarah's solutions - decided they wanted to extend the brief to the whole house. The wife's study on the half-landing is now a glass box with a pitched roof. For the main drawing room on the first floor, a spectacular nine metres long, Sarah 'dirtied up' the existing parquet with a dusky stain, added a geometric rug and made two seating areas. An L-shape modular sofa faces the curvy antique chimneypiece and an equally curvaceous bean-shape sofa, designed by Sarah and upholstered in a blue Rubelli velvet. At the window end of the room, more blue velvet sofas sit near the music and audio-visual equipment. The open fire makes this a cosy place to sit in winter and, with sofas pushed back, it can become a great party space.

On the three bedroom floors, storage space was carved out to the centimetre. The main bedroom on the second floor is pristine, until the owner pulls out from a concealed cupboard racks of glorious shoes. 'This was dead space from the closets next door,' she says, with some satisfaction. The main bathroom is straight from a Thirties Hollywood movie: marble floor, black glass vanity units, Perspex furniture and decorative scent bottles - you expect Ginger Rogers to emerge in an oyster satin peignoir at any minute.

'Sarah is really meticulous - the whole project is a massive success,' says the owner. Sarah adds: 'It is a gift to work with such an artistic and visual client, but I could not have done it without my wonderful team.' Delivered standing outside the glamorous bathroom, it could be an Oscar acceptance speech.