Explore designer Nikki Renshaw’s charming Kits character home

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Before we enter her house (virtually, of course), Nikki Renshaw needs to make one thing quite clear. “This isn’t how I design,” says the interior designer. “This is my personal sanctuary. My house is really, really personal.”

Then she flings open the door to her Kitsilano home and we step into another world. The first thing we see is the Vivienne Westwood Union Jack rug in the entry way. Then there’s the rich darkness of wooden panelling, the sparkle of a crystal chandelier, a glimmer of gilt trim on an antique chair, and layer upon layer of deep, jewel-toned colour.

It’s nothing like the stripped-down, Scandinavian-inspired modernist look that has been everywhere these past few years. It’s romantic, comforting, dreamy, filled with treasures and distractions.

“There’s a real need at the moment to layer stuff in and make it comfortable,” Renshaw says. “I feel there’s a real move away from those minimalist spaces, and I think COVID has had a lot to do with that.”

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Renshaw may be best known to Vancouverites as co-host of CFUN’s Nik and Val Show (2001 to 2009), but these days she teaches interior design, writes about it and decorates houses like the ones she’s working on right now in Arizona and Kitsilano. She also posts about her home, and others like it, on Instagram @englisheccentrichome

Renshaw may not be an eccentric, exactly, but she is English and embraces a sort of well-worn country house style where different eras and esthetics rub comfortably along together.

She comes by it naturally—her grandfather was an antiques dealer and her great-aunt had “that lovely shabby English style”—though it’s also a reaction against the ultra-modern Brussels home she lived in as a teenager. “When I lived in Belgium it was like there was a hole in me and when I moved back to London it was like, oh, this is what the hole is,” Renshaw says. “My daughter is Canadian and this is the best life we can give her. But for me, there’s always a piece missing, which will explain my house to you.”

After Belgium, Renshaw returned to London to attend Central St. Martin’s School of Art. She was working as a TV presenter when she met her husband Chris, then a Canadian musician touring the U.K. In 1995, after a short stint in Los Angeles, the couple moved to Vancouver. When their daughter Olivia came along, they decided to stay.

It was Renshaw’s husband who first fell in love with the four-storey, 3,300-square-foot, circa 1913 Kitsilano Craftsman. “It was the mirror image of our home in London and that’s why we wanted it,” she says. “Subconsciously, to him it was like coming home.”

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They bought the place in late 1998, and have spent the years since fixing it up. “We did it in stages,” she says. “I really feel you need to live in a house to really get the bones of a house.”

The house has two living rooms, five bedrooms and three bathrooms plus a powder room, as well as a sprawling kitchen and a lovely grapevine-covered deck “where we live in summer.” Each room is filled with treasures, many of them from England, others inspired by it.

In the living rooms, with their original wood-panelled walls, vintage and contemporary pieces sit together companionably. There is a Louis sofa (the first antique Renshaw ever bought), comfortable 1930s leather club chairs from the Hotel Vancouver, and an original Philippe Starck Ghost chair from 2002. “I always put something really modern in a place. Otherwise it will look like granny’s attic,” Renshaw says.

There are flowers, candles and books everywhere—“I have hundreds of books, hundreds and hundreds”—and artwork all over the walls. Renshaw particularly loves the pieces by Angela Grossmann and a 200-year-old vintage coral and butterflies diorama that used to belong to her mother. “I think that’s my absolutely favourite thing,” she says. “In a fire, I would save the cat and the dog, Angela Grossmann’s paintings and my mom’s butterflies and coral.”

The kitchen is warm and welcoming, with stained glass windows, a collection of 16th century Delft tiles, a massive Welsh dresser filled with blue-and-white jugs and marble counters “even though I tell my students not to, because its porous and it stains. But I want it to look like it was always there.”

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Heading upstairs, stained glass dapples the landing with jewelled light on the way to a place of romance and whimsy, where every stick of furniture comes with a story.

The master bedroom, its walls painted a soft “tea rose” pink, features a vintage bed, side table and dresser set Renshaw found at an auction back in London for £450. Olivia’s room, with its wisteria wallpaper and charming furniture, is straight out of a fairy tale. The office has a sweet Juliet balcony and the bathrooms feature delightful details like Edwardian sconces and cherubic chandeliers. “No room is too small for a chandelier,” she says.

And it’s not just the interior that is romantic and dreamy. So is the lovely secret garden, with its wrought iron seating and layers of trailing greenery, all enclosed by towering hedges. Renshaw can spend hours lost in this serene space. “I wanted to create a home away from home, but I also wanted to create a place where when you come through the gate you enter a different world,” she says. “In another life I’d come back as a landscaper.”

It’s taken her more than two decades to create this unique and personal space and it’s not something Renshaw would—or could—design for a customer.

“I think it’s important to create a place that is personal to you. You need to know what you love,” she says. “Your home has to be something that’s personal to you.”

How to create a cosy home, according to Nikki Renshaw

Vintage finds and fine florals