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Project Name: Knightsbridge Lateral Apartment

Location: Knightsbridge, London

Date Completed: 15/12/2016

Interior Designer: Staffan Tollgard – Lead Designer: Keisha Hulsey

Architect: PEEK Architecture + Design

The prized ingredients of a grand family home have been laterally re-strung to create a unique and contemporary masterpiece on an iconic London crescent. Lateral luxury presents a logistical and geographical problem for the London property market. On the one hand, property developers are meeting the demands of modern buyers for wide, open living spaces on one floor by building new buildings. On the other hand, some still crave the grandeur, romance, and importance of buildings from a previous age, nestled in the heart of London’s most prized locations. These buildings are not wide, and staircases are architecturally ubiquitous. This apartment in one of London’s most sought-after Knightsbridge garden crescent offers another answer.

By combining four apartments, three of them showcased in one beautifully rhythmic series of entertaining spaces across a single floor, Staffan Tollgard Design Group have helped create a new form of luxury lateral living on an iconic crescent. The apartment’s listed building status proved a catalyst for design innovation; Design Director Keisha Hulsey and her team worked with PEEK Architecture + Design, scrutinising layout permutations in order to rationalise a living experience that could perfectly meet the logistical and social demands of an unknown buyer. Staffan Tollgard were respectful of the architectural integrity of each apartment; reinstating original fireplaces, maintaining ceiling beams, cornices and the cellular structure of the original spaces. Yet through a judicious selection of contemporary finishes also created a new, coherent design journey, moving from a lighter to darker palette in the entertaining to the more private spaces, a play on light and shade that has created significant interest and drama. From four neighbouring apartments in three adjacent buildings the designers effectively and efficiently altered the orientation from portrait to landscape, offering a discerning audience an enfilade of three grand entertaining spaces; master suite with separate dressing areas; 5 further ensuite bedrooms, private study, wellness area comprising gym, massage room, sauna and steam rooms and an outdoor terrace housed in an annexed lower ground capsule apartment. The prized components of a grand family home have been laterally re-strung to create a unique and contemporary masterpiece.

Walking through the three entertaining spaces in the most important rooms of the house, looking into and over the gardens is a truly uplifting experience. Each room has been designed to make the most of its original proportions and orientation, and also to work together as a series of spaces in which to relax and entertain. The first is a relaxed yet elegant reception room that invisibly conceals the inescapable AV requirements of a modern home in a wall of joinery. The second is a more formal living and dining room with a fireplace at each end, effortlessly accommodating a 3.5m dining table and a free-standing bar from Italian ateliers Emmemobili and Promemoria. At the end of the enfilade lies the designers favourite space. A truly professional cooking experience from Electrolux Grande Cuisine has been literally carved into glowing Taj Mahal stone by Eggersman’s expert and exacting interpretation of our design. To either side of the fireplace and along the interior wall a bespoke joinery design uses back-lit stone and dark veneered panels to highlight and conceal; seamlessly revealing a hidden TV on demand, the commercial grade appliances from Grande Cuisine or indeed a hidden door into the master suite. The knowledge that this room functions a professional restaurant kitchen as well yet maintains the visual purity and beauty of a showcase space is profoundly fulfilling: truly functional sculpture.