Our north London project featured in House & Garden

There’s a glorious ten-page spread on a Victorian London house we worked on with interior designer, Lonika Chande and its owners, a young family, in May’s issue of House & Garden. A lovely piece written by Aimee Farrell, with photos by Tom Griffiths.

This was a wonderful project for a young family. Unusually here, the emphasis wasn’t on expanding the space, but on giving it much more clarity – creating a better flow of rooms for family life and connecting the interior with the gardens. We focused on the lower and ground floors and devised a solution to resolve the fragmented plan. Previously, the kitchen was confined to the front of the house, with dining and rear family rooms separated by a maze of underused spaces. The previous leaky, inefficient extension then stuck out on a high stone pedestal, disconnected from the garden.

Now, the ground floor has a large kitchen, open to this lower dining space, which steps down to the garden. Simpler, clearer and more generous. The materials palette is a mix of reclaimed London stock brick, Portland stone lintels, finely gauged arches and olive aluminium doors. There are bolder flourishes too, like this red concrete flooring in the extension to match the external terracotta brick tiles. There’s also an elegant secondary living space at the back of the house, with high windows and Juliet balconies onto the garden, plus a new stair to the lower ground floor below the existing staircase. As Chris put it, “a house that honours its heritage while supporting modern family life: colourful, functional and full of light.”