It started with the Kitchen

The owners bought this flat to let by the year. It had one bedroom, one bathroom, and a kitchen shut away behind a wall.

Their brief was one word, repeated. Homely. Not smart, not finished-looking. Somewhere a person would want to come back to at the end of a working day.

We started with the kitchen, and everything else followed from where it went. Opening it into the living space is what freed the metres, and the metres are what made the rest possible: a second bedroom, two more bathrooms, and a dressing room you walk through to reach the main one, inside the same eighty square metres.

The second bedroom earns its keep twice. A desk against the wall, because someone who takes a flat for a year needs somewhere to work, and a sofa that opens into a bed for the weeks when they have people to stay.

Eight months of building work. We did all of it, the works and the interiors.

Then the warmth. Herringbone oak underfoot. A pale kitchen against green veined stone. An old painted armoire in petrol blue that the living room is now arranged around. Mustard, and more mustard. In the cloakroom, a banana leaf paper in rust and green, the one decision in the flat that argues with everything else and is better for it.

One bedroom became two, one bathroom became three, and the flat feels bigger than it did empty.