‘I think I’ve already repainted the inside of the house three times since we moved here in March 2020,’ says the Slovenian-born, London-based lighting and furniture designer Lara Bohinc of her north-London townhouse. ‘The plan was that it would be part home, part studio and part experimental space for my work.’
The five-storey Victorian property where Lara lives – with her husband, their 14-year-old daughter and four cats – is her first interior-design project, and one she that has loved.
‘It’s definitely given me a taste for interior design. It’s also my first house with a garden,’ admits the artist, who transformed what was a traditional home, unchanged by its previous occupant for decades, by stripping walls to the brickwork to replace electricals, enlarging doorways and windows to send sunlight into every space, and reinstating original features throughout – almost all of which were beyond restoration.
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The carefully curated house is the ideal canvas for Lara’s own studio creations, which are everywhere and are designed from her lower-ground-floor studio: furniture, lighting and accessories inspired by her fascination with opposing sculptural forms, geometry and the cosmos. All feature generously proportioned feminine shapes and a material palette that includes many of the metals and stones used in her past profession as a jewellery designer. Most of her work is crafted in Portugal, with a few pieces made in Italy.
Lara, who founded Bohinc Studio in 2016, has designed her home as a series of separate spaces. Each floor, she says, almost feels like its own apartment, with a unique mood. ‘I like defined spaces,’ she explains. ‘I was used to lateral living in our last home, but what I love and discovered living here is that everyone can have their own space, and each area has its own language.’
The raised ground floor offers up the reception, kitchen and dining rooms, across a large open-plan space that looks out onto a tree-lined street to the front and a densely planted, lush garden to the back. Ceilings are high, which creates breathing space for Lara’s confident use of colour-blocking on the walls – often bleeding onto sections of the floor and ceiling.
It’s a good backdrop too for photography and art, by the likes of Sara Berman, Norbert Schoerner and Félix González-Torres, among others. ‘We do a lot of photo-shoots here, so I wanted something that would look good and function well. Paint is so easy to update when I’m bored. Change a colour and move furniture around and the house looks completely different,’ she says.
Playing with contrasts is a device Lara often uses in her work. In her home, that’s the roughness of a scree floor mixed with the softness of the woven wall-hangings designed by Lara for Kasthall or the smoothness of the crescent-shaped Rosa Portugalo marble console and two marble and brass dining tables, all from her ‘Afternoon Tea’ collection (2021).
On the first floor is the salon and an extensive library, which feels softer still. Scree is replaced with a two-tone chevron parquet – ‘it feels nice underfoot’ – and upholstered pieces, including the ‘Kissing’ armchair and sofa, a series of ‘Profiterole’ occasional tables in marble, the galactic-looking ‘Planetaria’ lamps and handmade wool ‘From the Sun to the Moon’ rugs for Kasthall, for a sense of cosiness. ‘We spend a lot of time up there,’ says Lara. ‘We’re all big readers and it’s also where we love to watch TV together.’
The main bedroom on the second floor has been designed as an indulgent, elegant suite. A dividing internal wall was removed to make way for custom timber wardrobes, with integrated sliding doors to separate the bedroom from an open bathroom.
‘I absolutely love my bed – I think it might be my favourite place. I love to sleep,’ says Lara. ‘That and long baths are my guilty pleasures. I can spend up to an hour in the bath, chatting on the phone or watching a movie on my laptop.’
The shower and basin are the real showstoppers in the bathroom. Created with off-cuts from ‘a marble graveyard’ at a quarry in Italy, a geometric jigsaw, designed by Lara, runs across the walls and floors. The top-floor attic – once accessed by a rickety ladder, which has been replaced by an azure blue stairwell – is now a bright bedroom and bathroom for Lara’s daughter.
What works throughout the building is a sense of openness on each floor, thanks to not maximising the quantity of bedrooms and bathrooms as is often the case in Victorian houses. ‘I wanted space,’ explains Lara. ‘It’s important that we live with my furniture and lighting, to see how it works, how it feels, to play with colour, so I needed a space in which we could do that relatively easily.
‘A lot of the pieces in the house at the moment are from the “Afternoon Tea” [2021] and “Peaches” collections [2022],’ she adds. ‘Coming out of isolation, I needed to be near people, to feel cocooned and to create a sense of love and connection, so I designed furniture that felt like an addition to the family. For my husband, my daughter, the cats and me, the furniture felt like embracing friends in our home.’
The reaction from visitors, says Lara, is fascinating. ‘People are definitely attracted to the bright-red “Big Girl” chair, which we have recently moved into the reception area. They maybe don’t know how to sit on it to begin with, but once they’re settled in and their feet are off the ground they don’t want to get back up,’ says Lara. People instinctively want to touch, stroke and sink into her pieces.‘That is exactly why I want my own furniture in my home – to see others experience it,’ she adds.
Lara’s focus for 2023 is a collaboration with US lighting producers Roll & Hill, as well as new furniture to be shown in Milan in April. She also has her eye on creating more tabletop pieces, such as ceramic tea sets and cutlery, and, of course, interiors projects.
‘I’m particularly interested in the emotional resonance of design. I think, looking back, these past few years have left such a big mark. It certainly has changed me as a designer and what I find important. I want things to be more emotional – that’s what I seek from objects, to create moments worthy of a response.’ bohincstudio.com
