“Don’t believe you can’t get everything you want”: An Industrial London Loft for an Architect and her 3-Year-Old Son
“Don’t believe you can’t get everything you want”, Louise Glynn, a Partner at Studio 29 Architects, mused on the subject of small-space design. Her encouraging words came on the occasion of our visit to the 42sqm/452sqft loft apartment she shares with her three-year-old son. The home, sited in the heart of London’s historical industrial area near the river Thames, is a testament to her belief – a manipulation of materials and solutions to ensure their compact space was cosy, comfortable, and above all, memorable: “This is a family home for my son and I. And this is most importantly his childhood home, I want him to remember it. That’s why I was inspired to become an architect: living in and seeing incredible properties as a child”.
A wall of windows lines one side of Glynn’s ground-floor, double-height unit in the southeast of London. The loft-style space is within the Alaska Building, an Art Deco building originally constructed in 1932 by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners as the offices for an adjacent factory. It was converted to residences during the ‘90s, creating a host of one-off spaces with all the beautiful quirks and awkwardly placed beams that come with formerly industrial spaces. Glynn loved the industrial charms and materiality but didn’t necessarily love the layout, which made no use of the double-height space, she explained, “it seemed like a missed opportunity to me.” The architect seized said opportunity.
A Slower Pace in the City Centre
Up a small set of exterior metal stairs with the garden to your right, you arrive inside Glynn’s home on a raised landing, which defines the entrance and gives it its own little moment. Before you are the stairs leading up to an open second-storey mezzanine, while to your side are ten large paper lanterns hanging from the 4-metre high ceiling over the dining space. Later, while sitting at this very dining table, Glynn reflected on its merits: “My favourite spot in this apartment”, she began glancing upward, “is probably where I’m sat right now, under the lanterns. It’s super relaxing; even when the windows aren’t open the lanterns are just floating very gently around and it just has a very calming effect”.
The energy throughout the home follows this theme; the sense of warmth was very much part of the planning as Glynn was looking to create a place where she could, in her words, “totally relax, have a slower pace, and just be calm in the city centre”. She achieved this through her use of rich materials like birch, raw pink plaster, and patinated metals – selected in part for the countering effect they had against the notorious London greys, especially during the winter months. An added benefit to these rich materials, she noted, is that their textures actually help to make the space feel much larger as well. Win win.
Birch serves as one of the grounding forces throughout the space, appearing in the dining room, kitchen, and bedroom in a variety of custom built-in cabinetry. Along the window wall, for example, Glynn designed a birch plywood unit with cabinets to store shoes, a niche to hide the original radiator, and a bench for sitting or displaying plants. Meanwhile, in the meticulously planned kitchen, Glynn opted for birch plywood cabinets with no handles to keep things as uncluttered as possible.
Mimicking the grains of the birch wood is the textured surface of the raw pink plaster lining the walls all the way up into the open mezzanine bedroom area. The mezzanine is accessed by the folded perforated metal staircase, which, significantly, floats off of the wall to give it a lighter appearance and to allow light to pass through into the darker areas behind it. On this storey, the bedroom Glynn shares with her son sits behind two sliding doors that fit around the original concrete beams, while the bathroom sits across the landing with its own unique beam obstacle. “You have to duck to get into the bathroom; it’s just one of those quirks of converted buildings”, said Glynn.
Think Big, Solve Differently
Amid all of these design features are clear signs of a complete and well-loved home, from the cosy L-shaped sofa facing a wall-mounted television for movie nights to the peg-board in the kitchen for easy access to utensils while cooking. Glynn is a model of her belief that you can have everything you want in a small space as long as you “think big” and “solve it in a different way”. She embraces the constraints of city or industrial dwellings, noting “you don’t need to add space to make a place feel bigger, you just have to manipulate materials and colours to have the same effect”. For her part, those materials are likely to remain ones that nod to her own history, reminding her of own childhood, growing up near shipyards and being surrounded by brick and steel buildings.
