Chelsea Grade II Listed Victorian Townhouse

The Building

A return commission. An early-Victorian listed townhouse in Chelsea, worked on for a client the studio knows well.

An early concept explored opening the basement kitchen and dining into a single space. The building's original proportions made the case against it. The listing confirmed what the architecture had already suggested, that the rooms worked better as a sequence than as one.

The result is a series of individual spaces, each considered on its own terms. The constraints of listed status shaped the approach floor by floor, and in most cases pointed toward solutions that suited the building more honestly than the original brief had anticipated.

Materials & Makers

The living room is fabric walled, a bold decision that grounds the space and gives it a depth the other rooms do not attempt. Soft furnishings sit in a tonal palette of off-whites, warm greys and quiet neutrals, with accessories from artisan craftspeople placed through the scheme rather than collected at the end.

Antique artwork was selected and integrated with the same consideration as the architecture. Each piece chosen for what it adds to the room it occupies.

The main bedroom is calm and carefully scaled. The headboard was sized to answer the shutterbox windows directly, the proportions of one responding to the other.