Case Study House / Residential Interior Design & Installation / Camberwell / London
Crafting distinctive spaces, creating a living art installation for your environment
Modern history: a MODULAR home in Camberwell.
Almost 20 years ago, we went on a last-minute trip to Palm Springs & Los Angeles for the whole mid-century modern architectural tour. Obviously, the EAMES HOUSE in LA was incredibly inspiring & it stuck with us. Shortly after we’d arrived back in London, we met up with a friend & complained that we couldn’t find anywhere inspiring to live & he said we should look up “his mate’s new website, The Modern House.”
We saw this single-storey house in Camberwell, which had been designed by the architect Martin Crowley in 1979 & we were sold. It felt like the closest thing to the Eames house that we could get in London. We called THE MODERN HOUSE on a Friday & by Monday we’d pretty much bought it. It felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity & in an untapped area of London at the time. The moment we stepped through the front door, we knew this was it & we felt the same throughout our custodianship of the house – a slice of California in Camberwell.
We loved the fact that you could open it all up & it became this amazing INDOOR / OUTDOOR space. It was the first home that the architect had built for himself & everything about it was clever – the materials, the layout & the position.
It sits in a row of garages & when the architect was obtaining planning permission, one of the stipulations was that it had to blend in. He’d bought two garages & part of the garden from one of the Georgian townhouses behind on Camberwell Grove. You entered into the courtyard, which was bordered by the OPENPLAN LIVING space & one of the three bedrooms, through a really normal looking gate with an orange door in it. Even people who had lived in the immediate area for 30 years hadn’t realised there was a house there. It’s was in its own little world & there’s was a real calmness to it.
After the architect sold the house, it had two owners who both respected the INTEGRITY of his design. The second owner painted some of the walls, but many of them were thankfully still exposed breeze blocks that we left that way. The floors were kept as the original terracotta tiles. We felt it was so important to keep the essence of the house for this architectural gem.
We didn’t touch the structure at all, but gave it a very quick makeover when we first moved in, installing a YELLOW DOTKITCHEN & changing some of the paint colours. We made small changes over the years & the space naturally evolved. Four days before we got married in 2012, we decided it was time to replace the very tired original bathroom with sky blue units. We were still grouting the night before the wedding!
We collaborated with fashion studio Eley Kishimoto & the printed kitchen units were covered with a pattern by them called ‘Sun Loving Bollards’. We installed a yellow kitchen the first week we moved in, so this was a much-needed update. COLOUR just suited this building so much.
In our bedroom, we slotted a shower pod into the corner & added a bright orange door. The tile design inside is a copy of a pattern from a U-BAHNSTATION in East Germany. We are fascinated by urban patterns & just love anything to do with Eastern Europe & the Soviet Union.
Although it wasn’t a conscious decision, the interiors are made up of PRIMARY COLOURS. They lent themselves so well to the house; the yellow & blue modular cupboards were vintage from Germany & we often changed the configuration of the house just by moving them around. It’s the same with the 1970s Vitsoe shelving system, which was original to the house. We often tried out new spots for it & used it as a room divider.
The posters on the walls are from Jason’s father’s huge collection of artwork that he created alongside graphic designer HANSSCHLEGER. Jason’s Father was the director of Mac Fisheries, which back in the 1980s was one of the largest fishmongers in the country & Schleger worked with him on the advertising side. We have about 150 original test prints, but we only hang a few up around us. They are strike offs, with Schleger’s handwriting on them & some of them are three metres long & even advertise unsavoury things like whale meat!
Our son never used to like the house because all of his friends had stairs & he would often ask why we didn’t have them. As he grew up, he’s loved the space. It was a brilliant FAMILY HOME; warm & cosy with two log burners & plenty of privacy from the outside world.