It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the black that wraps around the walls and ceilings of Linda Allen and Darin Brown’s flat, which occupies the ground floor of a Victorian redbrick in London’s Belsize Park. Then there’s the slightly disorientating effect of a wall of mirror glass between the living room and their bedroom. Except, this shiny expanse isn’t a wall at all. Linda and Darin got rid of that and replaced it with a glass-clad cube. “We wanted it to look as if a big shiny box had dropped down from outer space,” explains Linda. “We left a gap at the top and the bottom so it appears to hover, like a separate entity.”
While the box-within-a-flat idea sprang from Linda’s imagination, the final structure is actually far more down-to-earth and useful. On the living-room side it provides deep storage for the TV, shelves of books and “the kind of stuff that everyone has, but doesn’t want to look at every day,” as Linda puts it. On the bedroom side, mirrored doors conceal a utility area with washing machine and dryer and then an en suite, lined, naturally, in yet more mirror glass.
Linda came up with the design ideas for their flat so it fell to her to try to explain this box-within-a-flat idea to their architect, Roger Crimlis of Architect Your Home. “In the end, I climbed inside our old wardrobe, crouched down and said: ‘Imagine something like this but bigger, so it’s a whole separate room.’ Then, he got it and ran with the idea,” she says.
Even before their big glass box landed, Linda and Darin were drawn towards less conventional finishes for their home. When they had the ramshackle extension at the back of the ground-floor flat rebuilt as a dining area, they stipulated that the building materials – black steel beams, gritty concrete and bare brickwork – were left exposed rather than plastered over. “When designing our place, I wanted a raw, unfinished feel,” says Linda. Rather than hanging pictures directly on to the bare concrete wall, paintings are suspended with wires and strong magnets attached to the steel beams.
In the living room there’s more rough brickwork, partnered with lots of wooden panelling, all painted in matt black (Hudson Black by Abigail Ahern). The couple also added further architectural elements – plinths, pillars and corbels – that peep out from the shadowy corners of their home.
The smoke and mirrors trickery of this flat hasn’t always been Linda and Darin’s style. The couple met in their native Canada and lived in the US and Paris before settling in London seven years ago, where Darin works in digital marketing and Linda is an artist and interior designer. “All our homes have been different but tended towards a minimalist white look,” says Linda. “The feel of this one was inspired by the building itself and its Victorian architecture.”
When they first moved to the UK, Linda and Darin did the “tourist thing” of visiting historic manor houses at weekends. “I especially liked ones with lots of dark corners, secret doors and hidden servants’ staircases,” says Linda. As a tribute to that tradition, she worked a hidden WC into the design of this home. “It’s behind the panelling by the front door.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
