Even among the lovely Victorian terraces clustered around east London’s Victoria Park, this house is special. Once a church hall, it is spacious and stately with imposing neo-classical features. It became a popular community social club for many years, before being converted into a house a few decades back.
The owners, a couple with a young family, asked interior architecture and design firm Studio Skey to create a scheme that reflected the grandeur of the building, with characterful spaces and opulent features and finishes (all to an incredibly tight deadline, as the family were expecting a second baby). Founders Georgina Key and Sophie Scott’s luxurious wishlist included lavish marble and vintage Venetian chandeliers balanced with natural finishes and contemporary furniture ‘for a pared-back look that’s softer and more grounded’.
It’s a vast space, ranging over four floors, with five generously sized bedroom suites, so to bring it down to a more human scale, Studio Skey divided the once open-plan ground floor into three main areas. ‘It was lacking in functionality and purpose but, by zoning it, we’ve been able to create characterful rooms and a sense of intimacy,’ says Sophie.
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Now, there’s a kitchen-dining area with full-width bronze doors out to the courtyard garden, a relaxed TV room with an undulating chiffon-marble fireplace and a bespoke velvet sofa to accommodate the whole family, as well as a more formal salon for entertaining, including a pink-onyx bar featuring custom bronze metalwork that references the existing elaborate staircase.
Pink is a favourite colour for the owners – they’d already ordered a pink cooker before Studio Skey came on board – so the designers created a scheme of warm-pink, terracotta and burgundy tones. ‘They’re glamorous colours,’ says Sophie. ‘We’ve never done that much colour before, but we had fun with it.’
For sustainability reasons, and due to the time constraints, Studio Skey held on to many of the materials, restoring the grey-stained oak floors to a warmer natural finish and using the existing marble in the bathrooms, where they balanced the richly veined stone with areas of tactile tadelakt. Elsewhere, walls and ceilings have been finished with light-reflecting Marmorino plaster. ‘We wanted to keep the walls neutral to simplify the space, but it’s such a vast house that we needed that textural element,’ Sophie explains.
For bespoke furniture pieces, meanwhile, the solution was obvious: the owner’s brother is a furniture designer, William C Stuart of Costantini Design, with a studio and showroom in New York and an atelier in Argentina. ‘It was a lovely collaborative process with Will. He had beautiful designs and would send amazing samples of leathers and timbers from Argentina for us to customise pieces, such as the copper-cast bronze-legged ‘Benino’ dining table. He was committed to making it the best it could be, so there was good energy on this project,’ says Georgina.
‘It’s a very glamorous house – opulent, but also liveable. It took us out of our comfort zone and we had such a fun time designing it.’ studioskey.com
