Living Room, Private Client, London

A private living room commission for a residence in Hampstead, designed for a client who wanted a space that felt as considered as it did comfortable. The brief was clear: a room that could hold the energy of a full life without ever feeling cluttered or performative. Refined, grounded, and quietly unlike anything else in London.

Hampstead has always occupied a different register to the rest of London. Quieter, more rooted, with a relationship to green space and natural light that gives its interiors permission to breathe in a way central London rarely allows. This living room takes full advantage of that permission.

The back wall is the room’s most commanding architectural gesture. A large panel of travertine stone, its pale ivory surface veined with the soft movement of millennia, rises behind the screen in a single unbroken plane. Flanking it on one side, a full-height panel of deeply grained cerused oak introduces warmth and organic depth, the two materials standing side by side the way two old friends might — entirely different in character, entirely at ease with one another. Between them, a concealed LED strip runs beneath the stone shelf, casting a warm amber wash upward that makes the travertine glow from within at dusk.

Below the screen, a low floating shelf in pale cerused oak runs the full width of the wall, its surface generous and unhurried. On it, a carefully chosen arrangement of matte black ceramic vessels, a sculptural biomorphic vase, a tall form with a carved aperture, a deep bowl — sit at intervals with the studied informality of objects that have been placed and reconsidered many times before finding exactly where they belong. A small stack of art books, an amber ceramic bowl. Nothing more.

The coffee table is perhaps the most confident single decision in the room. A wide rectangular plinth in matte black, low and substantial, its surface utterly flat and perfectly proportioned. On it, a matte black sphere sits on a small white travertine tile, and a stack of books is placed with the precision of someone who cares deeply about horizontal lines. The darkness of the table against the pale timber floor below it creates a visual anchor that holds the entire room in place.

The sofa is large, low and upholstered in natural off-white linen, its modular form generous enough to disappear into. A cashmere throw in warm tobacco brown is draped across one corner with the ease of something genuinely lived in. It is the room’s most human detail, the one that says this space is used and loved rather than preserved.

To one side of the travertine wall, a sculptural olive tree in a large matte black vessel pot rises nearly to the ceiling, its silver-green canopy reaching into the room’s upper volume. On the opposite side, bare flowering branches in a matte black vase introduce a contrasting organic line. Together, they frame the composition from both edges, bringing the natural world into a room of stone and timber with complete authority.

Floor-to-ceiling sheer curtains on the adjacent window wall diffuse the Hampstead light into the room softly, and wide plank pale ash flooring runs beneath everything, open and generous, giving the room its final sense of unhurried space.