Schoolhouse Loft – East-London Interior Design & Renovation
A duplex inside a
Victorian board school
Clark Street is a two storey apartment carved out of a former Victorian board school in east London. The shell is the reason anyone buys a flat like this: a double height volume, tall Crittall style windows and warm London stock brick, all of it original to the building rather than added in the conversion.
The plan inside that shell was working against it. A galley kitchenette left the cooking end dark, the living areas were disconnected from each other, the circulation was awkward, and the bathroom was well past its best. The clients, a young professional couple relocating to London, had fallen for the building and were living around its layout.
A working kitchen, in a
room whose asset is emptiness
The clients wanted one genuine open plan hub where cooking, dining and sitting happen in a single sweep, with the daylight from the double height shell amplified rather than parcelled out. Alongside it, finishes that could take daily use without looking like they were chosen to survive it: forest green joinery, quartz worktops, oak herringbone, a calm palette drawn from natural materials.
Here is the difficulty. A kitchen is the bulkiest thing you can put into a room, and in a volume like this the emptiness is the asset. Push the kitchen back into a corner and you are back to the kitchenette they were trying to leave. Put it in the middle and you have filled the one thing that made the flat worth buying. The answer had to come from where the kitchen sits, not from how it looks.
The kitchen went
along the wall
A measured survey came first, then several layout options tested against each other before one was chosen. The scheme that won puts the kitchen where it takes nothing away from the room.
- Seven metres of kitchen, run along the brick facade. Held to one wall, the kitchen stops competing with the volume and starts framing it. The floor stays open, the double height reads uninterrupted from the door, and the brick becomes the backdrop to the busiest part of the flat rather than something you glimpse past a unit.
- A waterfall island in a Calacatta look quartz. One object in the middle of the room, not a run of them. It gives the cooking end a centre and somewhere to sit without rebuilding the wall that was just taken out of the sightline.
- The pony wall came out and the services went up. The survey established that the low wall cutting across the ground floor could come out, and that the services running through the space could be gathered into discreet bulkheads. Anything touching structure is confirmed by a structural engineer rather than by us, which is the point of surveying before designing rather than after.
- Detail where it is seen, restraint where it is not. Colour matched forest green cabinetry with brass shadow lines and concealed LED, engineered oak herringbone over electric underfloor heating, and upstairs a bathroom in large format taupe porcelain with brushed brass. The mezzanine bedroom and home office took fresh finishes and streamlined storage on the same palette, so the lighter touch rooms still belong to the flat.
In a conversion the building has already done the hard work. The risk is not that the interior will be ugly, it is that it will be busy, and busy is what kills a volume. Nearly every decision here was about keeping the floor and the sightlines clear so the shell could still be the loudest thing in the room.
What the flat is made of
No supplier names on this one. The materials are worth setting out on their own, because the brief asked for finishes that look considered and still take a decade of daily use.
How this project ran
A detailed site visit and measured survey to establish what could actually move, then concept development in which several layouts were drawn and tested before one was taken forward. The open plan ground floor and the bathroom ran on our Premium Make-Over package, which is what paid for the level of detailing in the joinery and the lighting. The bedroom mezzanine and the home office ran on the Basic Make-Over, on the same palette.
That split is worth noticing if you are pricing your own project. Full detailing everywhere is rarely the right answer. Putting it where people spend their time, and holding a consistent palette everywhere else, is usually what makes a whole flat feel resolved.
If you are looking at a conversion, a school, a warehouse or a chapel, where the shell is the reason you want it and the plan inside it is the problem, the place to start is a call. Fifteen minutes, free, and if the honest answer is that you need an architect or a structural engineer before you need us, we will say so.
More completed homes on the projects page, and how design work is scoped on the design overview.
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