‘Joyful minimalism’ defines this postmodern London home
For designer Sam Buckley, it was while lounging on deck chairs in a then-empty house with its owners that he first began to imagine what could become of this 1980s home in London’s Canada Water. ‘There’s a nice view at the back over a courtyard garden, so we sat there and took in the sights,’ he recalls. ‘It’s when I first had the idea of playing with light.’
Sam is known for his fantastical, full-spectrum approach to colour, but light is something he had wanted to experiment with for some time. He recalls a summer school trip to Villa Panza, taken while he was studying interior design in Milan, when he walked into a dark room lit only by a Dan Flavin artwork. The American minimalist artist is famous for his neon light sculptures, which, says Sam, really affected him.
‘You close your eyes and you can still see it. There’s a real intensity of colour going on there.’ Luckily, for this project, he was blessed with homeowners who loved nothing more than invention. They happily joined Sam in playing with the possibilities of customisable LED strip lighting, creating bespoke solutions that wash the walls with illuminating hues – an extra layer on top of his already-punchy paint scheme.
Sam’s bold approach to colour began taking shape when he learnt the history of this house, designed in the 1980s by Piers Gough, famously the postmodern architect behind Janet Street-Porter’s former home. The idea was to distill its geometric elements into something entirely current.
‘They’d seen some of my previous jobs, which were very geometric but also quite busy. They wanted something that was more calming, with a big use of colour, but a lot less detail,’ explains Sam.
In the living room, for example, the walls are quite a muted pistachio, with just the multicoloured sheer curtain providing a softly kaleidoscopic effect. Similarly, the kitchen, with its units cleverly stepped like a Tetris block to fit the maximum amount of storage space around the window frame, is a bold cobalt that pops against the bright-yellow bar area.
Upstairs, things get a little more extraordinary – an abstract Tellytubby-like landscape stretches across the bathroom, and the bedroom is a Neapolitan ice-cream-hued sandwich of colour that Sam says was inspired by the silhouette of rooftops on the east-London skyline.
The decorative choices may be brave, but otherwise this home is at times almost minimal. ‘The owners didn’t want too many soft furnishings, because of allergies,’ Sam explains, pointing to the ‘Mags’ sofa by Hay as one of the few non-bespoke pieces. There are plans to keep a look out online for furniture that fit this home’s postmodernist roots, but equally there was an openness to some of Sam’s more improvised designs.
The ‘Noodle’ stool, made of pool-flotation devices bound with cable ties, that he unveiled at last year’s Dundee Design Festival, was born from this project’s spirit, which Sam attributes to a love of Charles Jencks’s book Adhocism. In it, the postmodernist advocates making do with materials at hand – ignoring convention and embracing creativity.
‘For years I’ve been lumped in with the maximalists,’ he says, laughingly pointing to his dislike of layered pattern and clutter. ‘I think it was 2LG Studio who coined the phrase “joyful minimalism”, and I really like that – the one thing I hate about minimalism is that everyone seems so dour about it. Like, you know, just have fun!’ studiosambuckley.com
