Inside Rosie Steer’s Victorian Flat in Edinburgh Built Around the Seasons

There is a vintage trestle desk that came from France, bakery shelves from a friend’s café, and a dresser sourced from a yard in Perthshire.

There are foraged cones on the windowsill, forced bulbs in wee pots, and a self-imposed embargo on buying more Penguin paperbacks.

Rosie Steer has been shaping this flat slowly and intentionally for almost four years.

This is a home built around the Celtic Wheel of the Year — and it knows exactly what season it’s in.

In Their Own Words: Rosie Steer on Slow Seasons, Foraged Corners, and a Tenement Flat That Changes with the Year

My name is Rosie Steer, and I’m an author and creative whose work weaves together writing, photography and small acts of making inspired by the Celtic Wheel and the land I call home.

I wrote Slow Seasons, a creative guide to reconnecting with nature the Celtic way, filled with recipes, crafts and reflections for every turn of the year.

Each season I host small, thoughtful gatherings designed to help us reconnect with the rhythm of the natural world through craft, ritual and community. From wreath making and flower arranging workshops to slow living retreats and seasonal readings, these gatherings offer gentle spaces to pause, create and celebrate the turning points of the Celtic year.

Slow living is about trying to live a more intentional life. For me, that is by embracing nature’s rhythms and taking my cues from the seasons to savour the moment I’m in rather than rushing through life. It’s about trying to be more present and connecting with my environment, looking for glimmers of light and magic moments in the everyday — even in dark times, perhaps especially in the dark times.

I’m particularly inspired by what we now refer to as the Celtic Wheel of the Year, where the calendar was divided into eight seasons rather than four — the solstices, equinoxes and their rough midpoints. Reconnecting with nature this way reminds me that everything is a cycle and has its peaks and troughs. Paying attention to these micro seasons helps me to slow down and grounds me in the present moment.

The thing that helps me slow down when life speeds up is getting outside. The combination of fresh air, time spent in nature — even in the middle of the city — and the movement of walking really helps to soothe my nervous system and ground me in the moment in the midst of hectic modern life.

A walk never fails to calm me, even better if it can be somewhere green or by the sea. And when I can’t get out, bringing the outside inside is important to me — seasonal flowers, finds collected on walks, ways to remember nature even when we’re indoors.

We’ve lived in our Victorian tenement for almost four years; we moved in during the autumn of 2022 after spending several months doing the big, messy renovations, and then decorating and slowly transforming the rest of the flat over time.

When we moved in the flat was definitely not like this. It was very much a doer-upper. It needed rewiring, a new heating system, a new kitchen and bathroom.

The flat had such potential but had been badly neglected. We were drawn to the beautiful period features, although they needed a lot of TLC, and to the gorgeous natural light. We spent a really long, hot summer doing as much of the work as we could.

I never want to see wood chip wallpaper or a wallpaper stripper ever again, but it was so satisfying — stripping the building back to its bare bones and recovering its beauty over time.

Before we found our tenement we did look at other properties — wee bungalows a bit further out of town — but we decided we wanted to be a little bit more central and on the south of the city near our families.

I think this tenement was waiting for us, because it needed a lot of love and had a price to match. We were looking for something that had enough potential and character in its bones but that we could also put our own stamp on.

Neither of us wanted to rip out a brand new kitchen for the sake of it — we wanted something we could do more or less from scratch, although we learnt a lot along the way. I’m not sure we would take on such a big project again, especially not now we’ve got a wee family as well.

It’s a traditional tenement style flat — six rooms in total. Two bedrooms, a box room, kitchen, living room and bathroom. There’s a bedroom at the back and the kitchen, along with your classic skinny tenement bathroom, and then another bedroom at the front with the living room. The box room off the hall is my studio.

Much like my approach to slow living, my approach to building a home that I love has been slow and intentional. Most of the items you will find in my home have been collected over many years and are mainly pre-loved, coming from charity shops, vintage fairs, reclamation yards and antiques markets. I combine these finds with thoughtful pieces by independent companies and makers, usually saving up for them over time and choosing quality over quantity.

I also think colour is such an important part of your home, and we took our time to decorate — living in the space and seeing how the light behaved across the day and through the seasons.

Nature is my main source of inspiration when it comes to colour choice, with lots of neutrals, greens and rich earthy tones to create a calm atmosphere. For example, the dark, rich olive green of my studio feels really cocooning and cosy, like being in a forest, and is something that inspires me when I’m at my desk.

The seasons definitely change how I use the space. For instance, I spend more time in the back of the flat, which is south-facing, in winter. When the sun does come out it’s bright and cosy, and I love spending my time there writing and developing recipes.

Winter is a time for nesting, slowing down, and cosy cooking and crafting inspired by the season. I love to light the candles and bring in foraged evergreens, as well as forcing spring bulbs in wee pots.

When the spring arrives, the light starts to find its way into the front of the flat again and through the tiny skylight in my studio — always such a hopeful sign for me.

The thing I love most about living here is probably the kitchen. It’s been a dream of mine to have a big cottage style kitchen for a long time. When we viewed the flat it was a beautiful early spring day and the light was pouring in the back windows. That light was one of the things that really sold the flat to us.

When we bought the flat there was a kitchenette off the dining room with a cooker hanging off the wall that was probably a health hazard. So we built the kitchen from scratch in the adjoining dining room and made the original kitchenette into a wee utility space. It was a joy to see my design come to life and source pieces for it — from the open shelves made from reclaimed scaffold boards to the large vintage dresser we sourced from Robert Workman’s yard in Perthshire.

I wanted it to be mostly freestanding and feel like a cottage kitchen in the city. So we added details like a wood burner, peg rail, café curtain, hanging plates and vintage style lampshades — all over a long time, so it’s been a labour of love.

I often pinch myself that I get to use a kitchen as nice as this every day. Luckily our wee one loves to cook as well, and enjoys playing in his mini version of our kitchen that we got for his first birthday and upcycled from IKEA.

While sourcing pieces for my home I always think of the saying by William Morris:

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

This helps me create a calm and curated selection of objects and pieces that we genuinely love but that are also practical. Everything on the shelves is used most days. The shelves themselves are old scaffold boards, lovingly upcycled by a place called Move On Wood down in Granton in Edinburgh [Editor’s note: it’s now closed sadly].

A priority for us in the living room was thinking about how we zoned such a large space that was going to need to work hard for us. My husband works from home, so he has a desk area in the window — that’s his grandfather’s old antique desk and writing box, and that’s really special. It’s lovely to sit and work in the window with that view and watch the world go by.

It was also important to me that there was a reading space and somewhere to store all our books. I designed what I wanted the book storage to look like and our joiner made the shelves bespoke to the space from MDF, which we then sanded and painted in a colour to blend in with the rest of the room. For me that’s one of the main focal features in the room, and I’m sad that now they’re getting really full and I need to think about either getting rid of books or finding some more storage.

We have the old fireplace in the room as another focal feature. We also have our mid-century Ercol armchairs and sofa — bought many years ago, I think twelve years ago — and they waited a long time to be reupholstered until we could afford it.

I wanted the bottle green and the colour of the books to be the main features that added colour to the room along with the artwork, so we kept the walls fairly neutral. It’s also a north-facing space, so we wanted it to feel as light and airy as possible.

I spent a lot of time in the armchair next to the bookshelves feeding our baby for many, many months. This chair has taken on an even more special significance to me, and also to our wee boy who now loves to climb and jump on it himself.

In the evenings, putting on the record player, slowly placing the needle down and listening to some favourite music together is a really lovely way to spend the time — maybe reading a book at the same time, phones away, not thinking about the outside world, maybe just the baby monitor in the background.

One of the things I love about living in a tenement is the period features. We were lucky enough to see the potential of the flat when we viewed it — it did not look like this before — and we recovered as many of those period features as we could.

I also love the height of the ceilings and the tall sash and case windows in each room. Although little did we know they were in such a terrible state of repair they would need a lot of saving up to restore, they let in such beautiful light even in the depths of winter.

One of the things I don’t like about living in a tenement, especially since having a baby, is all the stairs. We live on the third floor, and baby plus pram, kit and shopping takes some organising to navigate. That said, I think it’s a trade-off for having such good light — and we’re not overlooked at the back, which means we’re really lucky in how much light enters the flat.

Another favourite spot in our flat is the window seat in our bedroom. The back windows overlook the communal drying green with a beautiful view over to the tenements opposite and a really tall silver birch tree.

I knew as soon as we saw the flat that I wanted to make a feature of that view so that we could linger and just enjoy it. The bedroom had the perfect spot underneath the window for a wee window seat, which I drew up a design for and got our joiner to make out of MDF. It has a small cupboard underneath for that all-important extra storage, and we sanded and painted it. To me it looks like it’s always been there.

I really love watching the changing shape and colour of the birch tree through the seasons, whether it’s the bare branches in winter or those bright greens in summer. Now our baby does as well, although I do have to stop him licking the windows.

I also love the colour of the bedroom. We decided to go with a darker colour to make it really cosy. The shade is Tea Rose by Atelier Ellis, and what I love about it is that how the paint is applied has an almost painterly texture reminiscent of plaster. In the dark — which, let’s face it, is a lot of the year — it feels almost like a chocolatey kind of brown colour. It’s really earthy and it really adds to the cosiness of the room.

We added some lighter pink touches through the linens and the cushions on the window seat, and also some more greens to bring in the greens from the rest of the flat through the William Morris print on the blinds.

When we moved in, the fireplace in the front bedroom had been really badly dipped and stripped and was beyond saving, so we decided to paint over it with a warm whitewash.

I’d recently been given a course by the talented Tess Newall on decorative painting, and after trying my hand at some smaller objects such as the lampshades in our bedroom I built up the confidence to decorate the fireplace. I painted vines of laurel leaves and berries in the middle as a nod to our wee one’s name, as it will be his room one day. He supervised me painting it when he was really little and certainly seemed to approve at the time.

After the course I painted the door of my studio with oak leaves, and I’ve definitely got the painting bug. We inherited a lot of pine furniture that I’m looking to upcycle one piece at a time.

Rituals are my way of bringing a little magic to the day-to-day. For instance, when it’s time to write in my studio and switch into creative mode, I always take my time to make a coffee — grinding the beans and savouring the process. Then when I get to my desk, I light a beeswax candle, and I feel ready to start.

The ritual of chasing the light around the flat like a cat is one that brings me great joy in this space. I love how it changes from day to day, season to season. And of course, with a wee one at home now, there are lots of rituals we have together in this space — whether everyday ones like reading together in the morning or our daily walk and trip to the local park, to special ones like making pancakes on a Sunday morning in our cosy kitchen.

I tend to opt for candles that are made with beeswax or soy wax. I think beeswax has such a beautiful glow to it — it cleanses the environment that you’re in and it brings such gorgeous, cosy warmth to a space, and I find that particularly inspiring when I’m writing and during the winter months. Soy wax is a beautiful wax to work with as well — one of the projects in my book is making soy wax hand-poured candles, and I’ve done this at workshops too. The way it holds and throws the scent is really beautiful, and it burns really efficiently.

I’m really drawn to analogue objects, materials, projects and ideas because I think they do help us to slow down and appreciate quality — especially things like music. I’m also really drawn to old books and vintage books, and I have quite an extensive collection now. I used to be an English teacher, so in part I think it went with the territory.

Books also inspire the projects I work on — so many of them we actually pulled together in design meetings and mood boards to inspire the design of Slow Seasons, even things down to the font and illustrations. I like to think that there was a reason why I was drawn to these books all that time ago, and they inspire my work as well.

I definitely feel like all these analogue objects make the space cosier and are also personal to me, especially as I remember the stories that go along with them — a lovely record shop that we visited on holiday, or a wee charity shop that we popped into on the off chance and found a beautiful version of my favourite book. It’s the stories that go with the objects that are so special, and that bring real life and personality to a space.

My studio is where I spend my writing days. The desk is vintage and came all the way from France. It’s a rustic trestle table, and I wanted something I’d be able to fold up and put away if we needed to use the space for something else.

We decorated my studio in a beautiful deep green — it’s Farrow & Ball Dibber, one of their newer colours — and I really wanted to embrace the cosy feel of the room. That was important to me because it’s small and it’s often dark, although it does have the skylight, and I thought I wanted to lean into the moody feel of the space and let the space inspire the decor rather than imposing a design on it.

I’ve added lots of personal touches. There are shelves behind my desk that store a lot of my craft objects, papers and knickknacks. They are vintage bakery shelves, and I bought them from my friend Jess Elliott Dennison when she moved out of her café and took on her studio space full time. I was delighted that we could give them a new home.

I also have some vintage books behind me at my desk — mainly Penguin books. I used to collect those, and I’ve now totally run out of room for any more, so I’m on a self-imposed ban. But I love the old designs and the type and just everything about them, so it’s important to me that I try and surround myself with those inspiring objects.

I also have a mood board above my desk that I decorated myself in the Bloomsbury style — there are circles and lines — and it’s updated each season with images, objects and things that I find inspiring.

The lighting in the space is really important to me — rather than a harsh overhead direct light source, I wanted something cosier, so I got some vintage style wall lights from Pooky and they’re on two of the walls and provide a lovely, warmer light. I also have a vintage anglepoise, and that is part of my ritual at my desk — lighting the candle, switching on the anglepoise. I know it’s time to work now.

I love to bring the outside inside to make my space more personal and unique to us — whether that is foraging windfall branches or large cones, or bringing in spring bulbs to force in the early spring and late winter. They bring such life and joy and are a reminder that spring will come eventually.

On the door of my studio, I have some painted oak leaves and acorns that were inspired by trips to the Hermitage in Dunkeld and by the Birnam Oak. Places we’ve visited inform the art I create in our own spaces, and that’s unique to us. And hopefully, if we move on, we’ll leave a little bit of us behind that’s personal to the flat.

Over time I’ve collected some beautiful objects, and I make sure I don’t save them for best. We use them and have them around us, highlighting them in styled corners and little vignettes. I rarely finish a walk without bringing some sort of treasure home in my pockets too — pine cones or shells. It looks like our wee one has the same affliction.

We display our finds in vintage printers’ trays that we have mounted on the bedroom wall, and I love the memories they bring of special walks and days out.

A typical day at home is usually spent looking after our son. We cook from scratch together, do lots of reading and drawing, and we’re out at least twice a day for a walk and a play at the park or spending time outside together.

I currently have two days a week at my desk when we have childcare, and I’m working on a couple of exciting new writing projects. Otherwise it’s trying to squeeze in a bit of writing when I can — maybe dictating ideas into my phone when we’re on a walk, or after the bedtime routine.

When other people describe my flat, they usually use the word cosy first of all — and that makes me absolutely delighted, as that’s definitely the feeling I was aiming for. I’d also say it’s a calm, light-filled space inspired by nature.