Projects

The spaces we spend our time on.

Each type of room has its own logic. Its own particular relationship with light, with furniture scale, with the way people move through it. Here is how we think about the five spaces the studio works on most.

A sitting room with warm terracotta walls, a deep sofa covered in mixed cushions and floor-to-ceiling shelving

Living Rooms

The room that has to do everything

A living room carries a peculiar burden in British homes. It is often the room you see first, the room guests sit in, the room the television dominates, and simultaneously the room where someone wants to read in peace and someone else wants the lights down low for a film. It is rarely designed for all of this at once, which is why so many of them feel like they are apologising for themselves.

The starting point is always the sofa — specifically, its position relative to the light source and the door, not just its size or fabric. Get that wrong and the rest of the room fights it. Get it right and the remaining decisions become considerably easier.

We spend a lot of time thinking about lighting layers in living rooms: an ambient source, a task source, and at least one lamp placed to cast upward or sideways so the room has some warmth in the evening. Overhead-only lighting flattens a room whatever the decor, and it is one of the things most easily fixed without major work.

Texture is the other lever. Two rooms with identical furniture and the same paint colour can feel completely different depending on what is on the floor, what is on the sofa, and what hangs on the walls. A rough linen against a smooth leather, a worn kilim against polished boards. These contrasts are what give a room its interest without requiring more stuff.

A kitchen with natural wood table, warm pendant lights and simple white cabinetry with a tiled splashback

Kitchens & Dining

Rooms that reward proper thinking

Kitchen design gets a great deal of attention in the UK, and a disproportionate amount of it is spent on cabinetry finishes. The finish matters, but it matters less than the layout, the worktop height, and the lighting — none of which you can easily change after the fact.

Good kitchen design starts with the triangle: hob, sink and fridge. Where these three land relative to each other determines how much frustration someone experiences every time they cook. A kitchen that looks beautiful but requires three extra steps to do anything simple is a kitchen that erodes goodwill over time.

The dining area, when it shares a space with the kitchen, is often treated as an afterthought — a table squeezed in wherever the layout allowed. It should not be. The table is the most social piece of furniture in the house. Its size, shape and position relative to the kitchen and the window shapes whether people linger or leave quickly.

Lighting in a combined kitchen and dining space almost always needs to be on two separate circuits. The kitchen needs bright, clear task light. The dining table needs something much warmer and lower to feel intimate. One switch for both is a compromise that serves neither.

A bedroom with soft grey walls, white linen bedding and a narrow reading lamp casting warm light

Bedrooms

Less than you think, better than you expect

The most common mistake in a bedroom is trying to squeeze in too much. The bed is always the right proportion for the room. The bedside tables are too small, the wardrobe is too big, and the chair in the corner has become a clothes repository rather than somewhere to actually sit.

Bedrooms are one of the few spaces where doing less, intentionally, produces a better result. When a room has the right amount of storage, properly specified so things actually fit inside it, and the right amount of furniture for the floor area, what remains is space, and space is the luxury most bedrooms are actually missing.

Fabric is doing most of the work in a bedroom. The weight and texture of the bedding, the choice between curtains and shutters, the material of the headboard. These define whether a room reads as warm and particular or cold and generic. A headboard in aged velvet against a chalky plaster wall is a different room from the same dimensions with a wooden headboard and synthetic curtains, even painted the same colour.

Bedside lighting deserves more thought than it usually gets. A pendant hung from the ceiling on a long cord, adjusted to reading height, takes no floor space and casts far better reading light than the small lamps that sit on most bedside tables. It is a small change that makes an appreciable difference every single evening.

Whole-Home Projects

Getting a house to speak with one voice

A whole-home project is not a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen designed in isolation and stacked together. It is a single scheme that considers how the house moves — how the hall sets an expectation, how the staircase connects the floors, how the light changes through the day from one end of the plan to the other.

The palette in a whole-home project is developed across the entire property before any individual room is specified. This is not about making everything match. It is about making sure nothing jars. A strong colour in one room should have an echo somewhere else. The flooring should have a logic as it changes between spaces. The joinery should read as a family, not a collection of decisions made at different moments.

Whole-home projects are also where the practical decisions about sequencing matter most. Trade access, delivery windows, the order in which rooms are completed — all of this needs coordinating to avoid a finished kitchen being used as a storage area for bedroom furniture during a messy two-week overlap.

The budget conversation in a whole-home project is different from a single-room project. There is always a question of where to spend properly and where to hold back, and the answers are specific to each house and each brief, not a general rule about kitchens always getting the money.

Some of the most rewarding whole-home projects are not renovations at all, but repositions: taking a house that has been lived in for years, making sense of the accumulated decisions, and arriving at something that feels coherent without starting again from scratch. These projects require a different kind of thinking (additive and editorial rather than blank-slate) and tend to produce the spaces that feel most personal and most settled.

Full service details
A compact flat interior with clever built-in storage, warm lighting and a small but well-arranged sitting space

Small Spaces

Constraints make better rooms

Small rooms force precision. You cannot cover a bad decision with additional furniture or a second sofa. Every element needs to be the right size, in the right position, pulling its weight. This is actually easier to design well than a large, undisciplined space — provided you are willing to think hard about what the room genuinely needs rather than what you assumed it needed.

The classic errors in small rooms are buying furniture that is too large (a three-seater sofa in a room that only has space for a two-seater and a chair, but a two-seater felt like a downgrade), installing too much storage that takes up floor space, and choosing a single overhead light that makes the room feel smaller rather than a distributed arrangement that fills it with warmth.

Scale plays differently in compact spaces. A single large piece of art on a small wall reads better than several small pieces competing for attention. A full-height bookcase in a compact study draws the eye up and makes the room feel taller. A large rug in a small living room, run to the edge of the furniture, makes the space feel more generous than a correctly-proportioned rug does.

Small spaces also benefit most from vertical thinking: shelving above door frames, deep window sills turned into reading seats with storage below, mirrors placed to catch specific light rather than just to reflect. These are the details that distinguish a well-designed small room from one that feels apologetic about its size.

Working on one of these?

Send us a note about the room (or the whole house) and we will talk through what makes sense for the project and how to get started.

[email protected]