How to elevate a rental with minimal interventions? Charu Gandhi has nailed it with her London home

This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.

The old idea of rental homes as sterile spaces – with unadorned walls last painted in the 1980s – can be set aside. Charu Gandhi, founder and director of design studio Elicyon, has been renting since 2015, and her home – a late-Victorian red-brick semi in Putney that she and her family moved into when her son started school near Richmond Park – bucks the trend.

Although Alton House had beautiful bones, it had been poorly maintained by the previous tenant, with damp patches, a broken entrance pendant and even a hole in the living room floor. After the landlord undertook essential repairs, Gandhi began shaping the interiors with an emphasis on impactful yet superficial and reversible design, aware that she would only be living here for a few years. What followed is a masterclass in elevating a space without major renovations: a deft blend of a designer’s flair and a renter’s pragmatism.

‘I wanted to bring our personality as a family to what was offered as quite a bland rental property,’ she says. ‘I wanted to create spaces with personality, an element of fun – really make it ours.’

Gandhi suggests focusing on the rooms in which you spend most of your time – in other words, picking your battles. In the designer’s case, she left the retro kitchen and bathrooms as they were, choosing to embrace their quirks.

In the shared areas, Gandhi enriched the rooms through colour and texture, infusing the home with a ‘considered’ mix of contemporary pieces, vintage finds and meaningful artworks.

The designer chose hues that instinctively ‘uplifted the architecture’, only later recognising their Indian undertones – an unconscious nod to her heritage, perhaps. ‘This was not at all forefront of my mind, but anyone studying the “psychology of colour” would have a field day with the connection!’ she says.

The living room’s shade, India Yellow, was the ‘boldest choice’, Gandhi continues. ‘We loved the idea of a really rich, almost velveteen room with a strong enough colour that we could call it the “yellow room”.'

Gandhi’s study glows in Indian Terracotta, a ‘grown-up version of a feminine colour’, says Gandhi, chosen to echo ‘a sweet little fireplace with peachy-toned tile work’. Her daughter’s room is a prime example of embracing inherited features, pairing the existing blue-and-white gingham curtains with a dusky Amchoor paint to beautiful effect.

Other quick edits helped humanise the home: café-style curtains replacing dated blinds; layered rugs covering unappealing floors; and decorative lighting adding a level of detail rarely seen in rental properties. Charu frequently sources furnishings from auctions, antique dealers and vintage markets, as well as restoring or reupholstering pieces – lending the home a soulful, lived-in warmth.

Despite the resourcefulness required to transform this rental into a rare gem, the house itself offered a series of organic design moments needing no intervention: a stained-glass front door ‘that draws you into the house’, a charming sunroom which ‘feels like it sits within the garden’, and a staircase crowned by a skylight. The way in which Gandhi has harnessed these shows, refreshingly, that, in a world obsessed with novelty and excess, you can create something truly beautiful through creative and selective reuse.