Inside a brutalist Barbican home with a surprisingly soft centre
When Andrew Griffiths, founder of A New Day interior design studio, was contacted to renovate one of the apartments in the Barbican estate’s Lauderdale Tower, the western-most block that stands like a concrete spine at the city’s centre, he made an intriguing discovery: ‘The more time you spend there, you realise the Barbican apartments have this lovely serenity. It’s unusual, because it’s such a hard exterior, but once you get up there, there’s a quietness to the spaces,’ he says. ‘You feel protected.’
Capturing that tension, he felt, was key to the project’s success. He admits feeling daunted by the prospect of reimagining a four-bedroom home in one of the most famous examples of brutalist architecture. In fact, his client – a professional in her late thirties who was introduced by a mutual friend – shared his apprehension. The property had been in her family for years and her home for a decade.
‘She felt intimidated by how to live in a piece of architectural history. It had been a much-loved space but it was tired,’ he recalls. ‘Her brief was grounded in the context of the Barbican: “How to be sensitive to it and celebrate it, but in a way that reflects me more?” Living in the Barbican is such an intentional thing. She could have lived in any part of London, but she chose there.’
The generous floor plan – one of the biggest in the estate – suited her needs perfectly. ‘She likes to be able to host and has family living overseas so needed the guest bedrooms, plus she wanted a work space,’ Andrew explains. ‘We were never going to bash it all apart and turn it into a two-bedroom apartment. The layout was the layout; it was much more about materiality.’ The only architectural change he made was to remove a wall section of the galley kitchen, creating a breakfast bar and opening it up to the living room.
After 40 years, the original kitchen’s oven didn’t work and there were only two plug sockets; his client worried about losing a piece of history but longed to cook a proper meal. He persuaded her to let it go – ‘it’s a beautifully done thing but it was important it didn’t just become a shrine’ – and designed a bespoke kitchen that Holte Studio crafted in sapele wood to complement the mahogany that forms the doors and windows in the apartment.
From the living room’s energising hits of red and butter yellow to the cosseting plaster pink of the main bedroom and the intense olive green of the study, a sophisticated colour story defines the spaces. Andrew’s motivation was to help his client disconnect from her demanding job. ‘With the apartment being in close proximity to the City, you lose that distance of a commute,’ he explains, ‘which is great in many ways but at the same time her home needed to transport her away from work mode.’
All along, Andrew was conscious of the responsibility he carried, both to his client, for whom the process of necessary change was ‘quite emotional’, and the building itself. Her trust in his sensitive approach was amply rewarded. ‘She absolutely loves it,’ he tells us, adding, ‘it has become somewhere she wants to invite people into, to sit at that counter having coffee or for dinner. She realised the home wasn’t paying homage to the building or delivering for her lifestyle before, whereas now it does both.’
After admiring this London icon for so long, Andrew has made his own valuable contribution to it, embodying its modernist values through the best of contemporary British design. But more than that, he has helped one of its residents make the most of her home high above the city. anewdaydesign.studio
