LIKE MANY SEASONED DESIGNERS, Sarah Vanrenen sees things that others do not. She’s able to imagine an empty room or the ruinous exterior of a house or an overgrown backyard in a finished—and glorious—state. And she is able to realize that vision to completion. For instance, when she and her husband came upon a late 19th-century cottage in London’s Notting Hill, she looked beyond what she describes as a “rickety old thing, with wobbly walls and no doors.”
At the threshold, faced with
