Serena Fokschaner

London

Design and Interiors Writer for national media at Freelance

Design and interiors journo with (tricky) Mitteleuropean surname. Mainly on Instagram. Shelfies not selfies though.

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Articles

Sennowe Park: an Edwardian pleasure palace that recaptures the spirit of the times

5 days ago | worldofinteriors.com | Serena Fokschaner |James McDonald |James Mcdonald

On a midsummer afternoon, sunshine pours through the high, glazed roof of the winter garden at Sennowe Park in Norfolk. The air is hothouse heady with exotic plants trailing from pots; a fountain plays in the marble gazebo. All that is missing from this quintessentially Edwardian scene are the house-party guests – men in panama hats and stiff collars; the women, elegantly pearl-strung and satin-sash-waisted.
Tiles that are too good to be left in the bathroom

1 month ago | ft.com | Serena Fokschaner

The corner of architect Aida Bratovic’s Edwardian home in London has become a magnet for people posing for selfies.
A west London maisonette with a resourceful approach to high-low interiors

2 months ago | 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.
Art Deco at 100: love it or loathe it?

Jan 22, 2025 | ft.com | Serena Fokschaner

Once a year, interior designer Nicky Haslam creates a tea towel listing the things he finds “common”.
How to make a terraced house suitable for multi-generational living

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.
Brandon Schubert cleverly mixes periods and styles in a Victorian villa in north London

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’.
Inner peace: from clutter to calm at a house in southeast London

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.
What is it that makes an interior compelling?

Nov 20, 2024 | houseandgarden.co.uk | Serena Fokschaner

Charlotte Boundy's kitchenHave you ever wondered why one room can linger in the imagination, inviting us to revisit the details again and again, while another is as forgettable as the lyrics of a bad musical? Imagination and ingenuity, wit or a bravura use of colour (pistachio green against potted-shrimp pink, raspberry-pink cushions on a lemon-yellow sofa) all count. But the real reason why we find certain interiors so compelling is because they radiate soul. They feel lived in, personal.
The Viking-inspired home riding the crest of a bold architectural wave

Nov 17, 2024 | ft.com | Serena Fokschaner

The British seaside home has a number of archetypes. There is the whitewashed cottage or gabled Victorian villa.
Winifred Nicholson and the unfashionable art of rag rugging

Oct 23, 2024 | ft.com | Serena Fokschaner

Once a staple of rural British homes, rag rugs — tufted rectangles made from remnants or scraps of old clothing — brought warmth and...