Light Work

This Notting Hill home started life as a Richard Seifert-designed factory, built in the 1950s; by the turn of millennium, it was a live-work space belonging to designer Ross Lovegrove, all white walls, glass floors and a very Lovegrove sculptural staircase inspired by the DNA double helix. Its latest remake, at the hands of architecture and design practice Arcola Studio, has seen the building converted solely for residential use; the staircase remains, but the warmth and materiality applied here make it feel much more like home.

Arcola was brought on board by new owner Merck Mercuriadis, a British-Canadian music executive. The 489 sqm buildings sits on a wedge-shaped footprint, over four floors: “thankfully, because of its industrial past, each floor was columnless, so everything could be cleared away to leave completely open floors. We basically just started from scratch,” says Arcola’s co-founder Sami Jalili.

He adds that Mercuriadis “was very keen that Ross’ influence on the place was retained, although there wasn’t too much Ross there in the end: it was a pretty bare-bones industrial building.” That industrial palette of raw aluminium, stainless steel, glass and concrete is still in evidence, but it is much softened by timber (both built-in joinery and loose furniture) and soft furnishings. “We wanted to use cabinetry to define different areas, using a selection of veneers to do it in the cleanest, but also the warmest, way,” says Jalili.

Tino Seubert’s Corrugation wall lights, which extend on two wavy pieces of bentwood pear-veneer, clasping an aluminium tube, seem to perfectly sum up the multiple influences on this project – the bentwood referencing the era of the original factory, and the timber-meets-metal symbolising the mix of the industrial and the homely of the house’s present incarnation.

Being able to create completely open-plan spaces with no restrictions on layout may have been an ideal scenario, but this was tempered by the fact that planners wanted the mews-facing side to remain looking like a commercial building – no front door allowed. A relocated entrance is concealed behind steel louvres that replace a garage door (and there’s also a long, corridor-like second entrance that connects to the main street behind the mews).

The ground floor now contains an open-plan kitchen, living and dining area, with the kitchen and living spaces broken up by the circular Lovegrove staircase, rising up into the room; and the living and dining spaces separated by a full height and width curtain, in an open-weave fabric from de Le Cuona. “When you’re sitting inside the dining area, you don’t feel enclosed, because you’ve still got that translucency,” says Jalili.

The dining table (paired with Knoll chairs) is a Lovegrove inheritance, part of the designer’s Liquid series made from a single piece of aluminium, with legs that look like they have been pulled, like caramelised sugar, out of the base. It sits on a glass floor that helps to filter light down to the basement below.

The basement is now Mercuriadis’ listening room and den, lined with shelves for vinyl. “We knew it was going to have to be monochrome – raw aluminium, black veneer and concrete,” says Jalili. Needing to hold the weight of some 50,000 records, “the area around the wall had to be selectively reinforced, working around the existing underfloor heating system. It looks super-clean, because all you can see are the solid 10mm aluminium shelves. But there’s a whole steel ladder system behind it that’s completely concealed. It needed its own structural engineering certificate.”

The house changes in character from top to bottom, with a graduated approach. Wall colours get more warm-toned (using Edward Bulmer Natural Paints), with a different choice of timbers on each floor, too. The large master bedroom suite, which sits under the eaves and takes up the entire second floor, uses oak, for example, and although it has a very different atmosphere to the masculinity of the listening room in the basement, “we wanted to feel like it was a staged process, so that it was all connected,” says Jalili. From the bedroom, a spiral-staircase accesses a roof terrace above.

While Arcola has always used built-in joinery for its projects, this is the first time that it has designed a lot of the loose furniture. The studio also designed most of the rugs for the house, such as the curving examples in the first floor living area and the bedroom; Jalili describes them as “like a pool, or a puddle,” and they are designed to trace the shape of the curvy furniture that sits on or around them. The architecture itself is one of straight lines and some tricky angles, too, so these curves help to tame, soften and disguise some of those difficult angles.

Jalili says that the studio is working towards putting together a capsule collection of products inspired by the bespoke work it has undertaken for recent projects: a new string to its bow that will no doubt feel as effortless as this mews house, yet with just as much hard work and attention going on behind the scenes.