Our clients – a private international family – had commissioned a comprehensive transformation of this period property in one of London’s most characterful conservation areas, expanding the home to approximately 450 square metres across five storeys with a new basement and a rear extension.
The architecture was in expert hands with 23arc. What they asked of us was a very particular question: how do you take something architecturally rigorous and make it feel like a family home? How do you add warmth without losing the precision? They were clear that the answer did not lie in softening the architecture. It lay in listening to it, and then answering it with an interior that felt as considered, and as alive.
We were brought in as interior design consultants during the design process, working in dialogue with 23arc’s architectural vision rather than independently of it. Our scope covered the full Belongings remit: FF&E design, specification, procurement and installation. The architecture set the terms, our work was to answer them with a material palette, a selection of Belongings, and a curation of objects and art that felt entirely native to the spaces 23arc had created.
The answer came from discipline, paradoxically. We established a strict, harmonious palette of natural materials – stone, oak, linen, muted plaster – that refused to compete with the architecture and instead became part of it. This was not restraint for restraint’s sake. It was a conscious act of listening: establishing a ground that was quiet enough to hold what would come next.
What came next was the life. Over the course of the design journey, we worked closely with our clients to layer in the things that truly belong to them: artefacts and artworks gathered across years of living and travelling, objects with history and meaning and personality, held alongside carefully chosen new pieces sourced specifically for this house.
The kitchen design went through several iterations as we tried to find space for all the Questions of Living this family required. We ‘stole’ additional pantry space from a room behind the kitchen and argued that functions could be hidden inside sliding or bifold doors in order to have a fully functional, working kitchen when it was needed, and a sleek minimal ‘closed’ version when entertaining in the adjacent open-plan dining area. Kitchen gurus Lanserring took the design intent and made it sing, quietly – yet dramatically.
The glazed oak lantern staircase is the vertical spine of the house: at once functional sculpture and architectural connective tissue, threading five floors into a single gesture. At every level, it was our work to ensure the interiors rose to meet it.
The clients asked us to bridge architectural rigour with warm family life. What we found, as we always do, is that the bridge was already there – woven into the materials, the proportions, the vertical light. Our work was to dress it, layer it, and bring it home.
Architect: 23 Architecture
Photography: Simon Kennedy
