Hall together now

The way we live now

In glorious County Fermanagh recently for a birthday hooley, we did two National Trust big houses. The first was notionally grander, with a Big Brand London 18th-century architect (Wyatt) and museum- quality furniture. The second was relatively more modest and local, and had even been reconstructed after a Fifties fire by that 20th- century master of re-Georgianisation Professor Albert Richardson. Surprisingly I preferred the second house. The halls did it. House One had the predictable enclosed Grand Cube hall where nothing moved, the mandatory fake doors for symmetry and the rest of the imported Classical thing. But House Two opened right through on to an asymmetric staircase, with views of the park through the long windows. It came alive for 21st-century taste. Presumably in 1790 it was seen as rather old-fashioned - not as Classical as the latest London/ Fermanagh style.

Halls are meant to say so much about status and personality. And meant to be useful too. Trad halls had a set of those hall chairs - hard, wooden-seated but elegant in a mean-spirited way - with coats of arms in the back. Then there'd be a console table (ideally Irish Georgian with a green marble top), a giant mirror, useful for the last-minute check but primarily to make a narrow space look wider. Then - wham bang - pictures. A set of 18th-century Premier League portraits - Ramsays and Romneys -continuing up the stairs said one thing, and we know exactly what it means. A giant mixed-media affair involving canvas, acrylics and twinkly diodes says quite another.

For people who're all heart rather than all status, the hall is the place to start loving it up. Welcome mats and every kind of framed kind thought. Estate agents are tremendously fussed about halls and first impressions. They want halls to be tidy and welcoming rather than full of social signifiers. Scrape away the chaos, hang up the coats.

The hall pictured here looks to be in a largish, undistinguished but pleasant 1890s villa; a sort of house I know pretty well. And I know what to expect: at the very least a bravura display of Victorian joinery - giant skirtings and architraves, elaborately turned banisters and shiny mahogany stair rails. But that's everything this happy, anti-bourgeois bourgeois interior has abolished. A lot of wood has been cleared, and possibly a fair bit of plaster. They've had the architects in and don't you just know it. The first thing you'll see is that greeny glassy staircase to heaven. How does it hold up? Do the children look up ladies' skirts? In these small cues and clues we see the 21st-century Belsize Park/ Primrose Hill sensibility - don't you just know that Sadie Frost's up the road and Hugh Laurie's round the corner. E

The showpiece glass staircase says, "we've had the architects in"

This nice old dark- hewn peasanty hall bench provides contrast to the hi-tech staircase

Those ultra-heels and rubber boots are really works of sculpture, part of the composition. And maybe the football is too

Op Art/Pop Art 1960s revival black and white rug, not at all the mellow Persian-on-parquet look you might expect

1960s-look New Chandelier, the kind of thing they sell in Century on Marylebone High Street: it's so not the hanging lantern

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