Bridge For Design Summer 2014 Bridge For Design Summer 2014 Issue | Page 160

Unusually, they had rented the house for a period before buying it;
this gave them – and Jonathan, who had worked with the couple on
other projects – a huge advantage when it came to deciding how the
space should be rearranged and renovated. It was an opportunity, as
Jonathan says, to take a step back, reappraise and reconsider.
Unsurprisingly, the house already had a history; it was built in the
1830’s as a school, the Kensington Proprietary Grammar School, and
as such was highly successful for many years, until a new school, St
Paul’s, opened in nearby Hammersmith. Recognised even then as a
out of business, and by the end of the century the house had reverted
to domestic use. Today, there is little to show of its time as a temple
which stretches across the back of the house and was once the schoolboys’ dining room.
The house had been renovated in the Eighties and was ripe for
change. ‘It wasn’t that it was wrong,’ says the owner, ‘it just wasn’t
particularly right.’ Although it had an atmosphere that both

and informal family room can be divided by a leather curtain

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Bridge for Design Summer 2014