Made to Measure
Interior architecture
City | London
A lateral mansion flat, stripped back to the bricks and rebuilt centimetre by centimetre around the way one family actually lives.
LOCATION: City, London
PROJECT TYPE: Full turnkey transformation
SCOPE: Bespoke Joinery Design · Colour Consultation · Lighting Design · Full Furnishing · Soft Furnishings · Art Curation · Styling
When a family invites you back, it means something. The first commission in this apartment was interior decoration, the trust-building work that many client relationships begin with. The second was different in scope: a complete strip-out. The reason a family hands a designer that level of responsibility is not the portfolio. It is what they experienced the first time. The attention to detail, the way problems were handled, the quality of the result.
As part of this second commission we dug deeper. How do they aspire to live? What had always frustrated them? What had they wanted but never quite asked for? That knowledge, combined with the confidence to act on it, is what makes the second project the one where the real work happens.
The brief was substantial. A generous lateral mansion flat, stripped back to the bricks and rebuilt over eight months. The footprint could not change, and the family had outgrown it. Children had become teenagers and needed separate rooms with distinct identities. Sporting equipment, books, craft materials, school bags, scooters and riding helmets needed homes of their own. The playroom needed to graduate into a family room that could hold multiple generations. The question, in every room, was the same: how to make more space without making more space.
“I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Claudia and I cannot applaud her enough. I have already recommended Claudia to several friends and have seen the results she has produced for them as well as for myself. Claudia has a very clear and well defined sense of style, yet she never lets it stand in the way of her clients’ wishes. She is able to read between the lines and lift a project into an original and innovative sphere of design, offering ideas and suggestions that more than complement the space worked on. She makes it a whole, at the same time creating a beautiful environment in its own right and providing a space for people to live and relax in. Claudia inherently understood my needs and was able to structure a brief around the assignment clearly and professionally. I am extremely happy with the result. I could not have asked for more.”
—Clients, Made to Measure, third project together
The Joinery Brief
Centimetre by centimetre. Person by person.
Few projects have given us the scope to demonstrate what truly bespoke joinery design can achieve as fully as this one. The process began with a room-by-room conversation with each member of the family, separately, in detail, without compromise. What does not work in your room right now? What do you need that you do not currently have? What would make your daily life, in this specific space, work better? The answers were precise and personal: lipsticks, sewing kits, craft materials, hairdryers, shoes, games, scooters, riding helmets. Every shelf and drawer was then dimensioned in centimetres around the actual objects it would hold.
This is the process that most interior projects skip. It takes time, and it requires a level of granular attention that cannot be hurried. The result is a home where nothing is stored in the wrong place, nothing is hidden in a box because there is nowhere better for it, and nothing occupies floor space that could be wall space. When every centimetre of a flat is designed with this level of specificity, the footprint does not need to change. The family simply fits.
The Hallway
From circulation to room.
The hallways of Victorian mansion flats are among the most underused spaces in London. Generous in proportion, central to the flow of the apartment, they are almost always treated as circulation rather than destination, a route between rooms rather than a room in its own right. The solution here was architectural in ambition and restrained in execution: a continuous canopy of slim bookcases installed above and between every doorway along the full length of the hall. The ceiling height of a Victorian mansion flat is exactly right for this. The books run overhead. The corridor becomes a library. The approach to every room in the apartment acquires a quality of depth and warmth that the empty plaster never had.
The second hallway intervention was equally significant. A redundant doorway, one of several routes between rooms that the apartment's generous layout had made unnecessary, was converted into a deep wardrobe. Coats and jackets for all seasons, mud boots, school bags, four sets of sports kit, scooters, riding helmets, the full apparatus of an active family's outdoor life. The hallway beyond was returned to order. The frustration that had accumulated there over years was simply designed out.
The Family Room
Storage as architecture.
The family room was stripped entirely back to the bricks, the most blank canvas in the project, and rebuilt as the apartment's most ambitious single space. Three walls of bespoke joinery were designed to hold the full contents of a family's shared life: children's wardrobes, exercise mats, a sewing table, a vast collection of games and books. The joinery is not storage that happens to be decorative. It is the architecture of the room.
The luxurious gesture that elevates it is the hand-painted chinoiserie artwork applied directly to the joinery panels. Ten native birds, each one chosen by the family, placed individually around the room by our artist collaborator. Every bird has a location considered in relation to the joinery composition and the room's sightlines. The family can name each one. The painting is not decoration in the conventional sense. It is a portrait of the family's own enthusiasms, permanently embedded in the architecture of their home.
The sofa deserves its own mention. Faced with a Pierre Frey collection in which every design was too good to discard, we resolved the problem by using all of them. A patchwork sofa assembled from ten different fabrics within a single collection, each panel a different pattern, the whole reading as an object of deliberate and joyful abundance. The most unusual sofa we have ever made.
“When every centimetre of a home is designed with this level of specificity, the footprint does not need to change. The family simply fits.”
The Children’s rooms
Every wish list item. Every centimetre accounted for.
The teenager's room presented the project's most demanding spatial constraint. A chimney breast in the corner, structural and unmovable (confirmed by the engineer's report after our initial hope of removing it was dashed), required the entire layout to be reconsidered around it. The wish list was non-negotiable: a sleepover bed that could double as a sofa and be closed off with curtains for privacy, a desk with a vanity station, shelving for books and the miniature plant collection, notice boards for artwork inspirations, sockets at multiple heights around the room for the migration of small lights and gadgets. Every item was achieved. The chimney breast, in the end, became part of the composition rather than an obstacle to it.
The younger child's room was designed with the same granularity and the additional pleasure of her own creative input. She chose the colour scheme, the wallpaper and the fabrics from our studio library herself. The room holds a climbing wall rack, a gym apparatus that the brief specified and that we found a way to install without compromising any other element, alongside a reading nook, a sleepover bed with curtain, a study desk, and the full storage solution that a primary school child's life requires. Every item on the list. Every centimetre accounted for.
The Colour
The best compliment this project received came from the family themselves on the day they moved back in: everything had been touched, and yet everything felt as though it had always been exactly this way. That is the ambition we hold for every renovation of an existing home — that the changes are legible only in the quality of the experience, not in any sense of newness or disruption.
The palette was built from Paint and Paper Library’s shaded colour systems for the main walls, supplemented by colours from multiple other houses — archive collections consulted specifically to find the exact shade of blue, yellow or aqua that each room demanded. The radiators were specified in bespoke colours throughout: some matching their wall exactly, some contrasting deliberately as a pop of colour. It is the kind of detail that reads as confident and considered in the finished room and that most projects never consider at all.
Lighting was specified without a single downlight. Wall lights, table lamps, LED strips and bookcase lights throughout — a decision that completely determines the quality of the evening atmosphere and that, in a Victorian mansion flat with its particular ceiling heights and plaster detailing, is simply the right choice. The rooms glow. They do not beam.
CITY
Urban Sophistication
Surf
Coastal Serenity
Ski
Alpine Craft
Every home begins with a conversation.
We have been working with private clients since 2009. We take on a small number of projects each year, and give the same depth of attention to each one - from the first conversation to the finished room. To find out how we might work together, book a discovery call.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
BOOK A DISCOVERY CALL