The client had moved from a large architectural award-winning house into a small apartment in a converted Victorian terrace. It had been renovated in the 1970s; our task was to renovate the apartment to accommodate his furniture and significant art collection.
Key points of the renovation
• We made the kitchen very much part of the dining room – it looks small but contains a huge amount of storage.
• The very steep staircase, which is the first thing you see when you come in the front door, had been inserted into what was once a corridor. To create a greater sense of space, we mirrored the risers. An otherwise useless void on the left hand side became the library, with purpose-built shelves and steel bookends; the staircase simultaneously acts as a library ladder.
• The one bathroom in the apartment also serves as a guest powder room. There’s a hand basin and toilet on one wall, and on the other, concealed behind floor-to-ceiling sailcloth, is the shower, plus washing machine and dryer. Because the sailcloth is waterproof, it doubles as a shower curtain.
• We couldn’t find a readily available pattern for the bathroom floor tiles – we suggested a design we’d seen in Fez, which the tiler fabricated from sheets of mosaic tiles.
• To increase the illusion of height in the attic bedroom, we routed out tracks in the beams and installed LED lights, which wash up into the ceiling.
