maida vale townhouse
Maida Vale, London
Two apartments — a lower ground floor flat and the upper floors of the same building — combined into a single family home across five floors. The clients had lived in the lower ground apartment for years, and bought the upper floors with the intention of unifying the building into one home.
The brief began as a renovation of the upper apartment, with the lower ground floor to be left largely untouched. In practice, as the new work progressed, the existing rooms stopped reading as part of the same house. The scope expanded to a full refurbishment across all five floors — a wholesale replacement of services and electrics, reorganised circulation, and a unified spatial language from the entrance level down.
Studio Insight
A common assumption with phased projects is that the older work will hold its ground against the new. Most of the time, it doesn't. The standard of finish, the level of detail, and the spatial logic of new work tend to expose the existing rooms as something separate — and the project either grows to absorb them, or ends up reading as two houses stitched together.
This project was always going to need both halves of the building to feel like one home. Recognising that early — and resisting the false economy of keeping what wasn't going to hold up — was the design decision that shaped everything else.
The interior was developed by a separate designer, brought on after the studio. The aesthetic direction is theirs; the spatial organisation, the planning strategy, and the technical delivery are ours. Collaboration of this kind only works when both teams accept that authorship belongs to whoever owns the vision. The studio's role here was to make the vision possible and then to deliver it — which is a quieter job than design from scratch, and a different kind of satisfying.
