Serena Fokschaner

Jan 27, 2025 | houseandgarden.co.uk | Serena Fokschaner

Future art historians will single out the pandemic as a defining moment in the development of 21st-century architecture. Aida Bratovic would agree. The architect and interior designer was living in her west London maisonette when the first lockdown was announced. The open-plan top floor, carefully designed for entertaining and cooking, became a full-time workspace for Aida, her wine-merchant husband and their two teenagers.

Jan 22, 2025 | ft.com | Serena Fokschaner

Once a year, interior designer Nicky Haslam creates a tea towel listing the things he finds “common”.

Jan 21, 2025 | houseandgarden.co.uk | Serena Fokschaner

In a vicarage designed by Tamsin Saunders, a guest bedroom doubles as a study. Chris HorwoodThe terraced house has always been a shapeshifter. Over the centuries, its floor plan has evolved to suit societal needs. In the 1980s we knocked through sitting rooms and bolted on side extensions. By the noughties we were blitzing through back walls, adding voluminous eat-live-cook spaces.

Jan 2, 2025 | houseandgarden.co.uk | Serena Fokschaner

The owners, a software engineer and a trade-policy researcher, bought the brick-and-stucco-faced house before the pandemic. Ensuing Covid lockdowns gave them time to work out the look they wanted, and exactly what they wanted to avoid (not least 'a glass box extension'). Their ideal, as one of the owners puts it, was ‘elements of a classical style, lots of antiques, but with print and textures so that nothing feels too constrained by the past’.

Dec 28, 2024 | theguardian.com | Serena Fokschaner

I hadn’t expected my interview with Ellie Gibson to open with a discussion about spice jars. Or to be precise: alphabetically organised ones. The comedian is the co-founder – along with Helen Thorn – of Scummy Mummies: a podcast dedicated, as she puts it, to the “hard, messy, funny… and humiliating” realities of family life. My husband says I’d turn my house into a Japanese theme park if I could. What's wrong with that? Her southeast London home reveals a rather different side.