The hallway sets the tone – an unquestionable personable space despite its miniature scale, with bright blue walls and deeper blue doors with fat, glossy handles. ‘I had in mind the idea of going into a nightclub where you’re not quite sure if you’re invited, or which door to go through,’ says Tom. ‘I like that it’s slightly confusing, and you might not immediately be sure if something is a door or a wall.’ With 1970s Paris in mind, he was contemplating a full-on leopard print carpet, but settled, in the end, for a muted Pierre Frey take on the style.
One side of the flat is taken up by the kitchen, a dining room and a sitting room, the latter two divided by a chimney breast. Tom installed an elegant felt-covered folding door on one side of the fireplace, so that the sitting room and dining room can be open to one another or closed off, and knocked through the narrow bit of wall on the other side, creating a desk which spans both rooms, but which can also be closed off with a matching folding screen. ‘I find that issue of open plan spaces vs privacy quite interesting,’ says Tom. ‘With open plan I always think, “Really, do you want to hear your partner coughing wherever you are, wouldn’t you like to be able to close a door?” So it was quite fun to be able to work those issues out.’
A desk bridges this gap between the dining room and sitting room, with Matilda Goad’s table lamp base and pleated shade on top.
Rebecca Reid
Tom refers to the kitchen as a rather Alice in Wonderland space, with its bright chequerboard floor, sunny yellow Marianna Kennedy blind and aubergine cabinets. As the owners are only in the flat two or three nights a week, and have an array of excellent restaurants outside the door, the kitchen only needed to be efficient, rather than all-singing and dancing, though Tom still found room for a banquette and table against one wall. ‘I love tiny kitchens,’ he says, ‘where you don’t actually have to move and you’ve got everything, literally everything there. It’s rather fun to minimise what you need in a small flat – the kitchen doesn’t have an oven, which I always think is rather glamorous.’
In the kitchen, the banquette is upholstered in A Rum Fellow’s ‘Momo’ fabric and piped with a leather trim from Samuel & Sons. The stool is in Virginia White Collection’s ‘Oleanda’ design.
Rebecca Reid