When it comes to renovation, as all too many know, the relationship between client, architect and interior designer can be a fraught one, a tense and wretched triangle, within which mismatched priorities lead to embittered disputes (and worse). Three’s a crowd, in other words. But for a happy few – Orlando Leopard, Carlos Sanchez and Elliot Barnes among them – it’s the magic number.
The trio have been friends for years – Elliot, the designer known professionally as EJR Barnes, has known Orlando since boyhood, while architect Carlos, one half of Sanchez Benton, is a relatively recent addition to the dinner parties Orlando has been hosting in his Hackney maisonette since he bought it in 2014. In the early days of his life here the musician, producer and founder of Baltic Studios says the house was, frankly, ‘just a bit odd’. The previous owners had boxed portions of it off, stymieing what light there was, and there was a ‘weird courtyard’ that only really came into its own for postprandial cigarettes. Dark, north-facing and curiously arranged, the house ‘had its problems’, Carlos says obliquely. Late at night, over food and wine, the three would scheme.
Orlando acknowledges that he didn’t particularly have strong visions for what it could become, largely assigning responsibility for its wholesale transformation to the imaginations of Elliot and Carlos, though from the start his aims were clearly defined: ‘It was just about making the space more useful for my life. Some of the things I really enjoyed doing – not least hosting – were very hard to do in the old iteration of the house.’ For Carlos, this meant transforming a series of small characterless rooms into ‘something that had a clear identity, that had a beautiful generosity. We wanted moments of theatre too – a house that was fun to be in. It was hard.’
To attain the spaciousness Orlando yearned for, Carlos’s design sacrificed not one but two poky bedrooms, turning the lower-ground level into one vast space for cooking, eating and communing. With roughly textured walls and a concrete ceiling still bearing the board-marks of its casting – ghostly echoes of the watery woodgrain of the kitchen’s Douglas fir cabinetry – it’s a mission statement of a room, one that doesn’t mess about in either its magnitude or stylistic declaration. Punctuated by a marble and painted-breezeblock kitchen island as raw and hefty as a Donald Judd sculpture at one end, and Elliot’s ‘Faux Ellipse’ table with its trompe-l’oeil top at the other, this is a room designed clearly with the enjoyment of others as well as Orlando in mind, and one hard to reconcile with the estate agent’s pictures of the plasterboard palace he shows me.
The theatre comes from a series of ingenious decisions – what Carlos calls ‘moments of surprise’ – largely centred on that ‘weird’ courtyard. In one of their early conversations, Elliot posited putting a roof on it. The result is a soaring structure of Douglas fir and glass that Elliot dubs ‘the orangery’ – a non-entity turned spatial cynosure with a colossal sliding door that, when open, makes garden and building feel one. Arranged around the top of the double-height space are Orlando’s bedroom and bathroom, both of which overlook it, though not with windows but large unglazed circular apertures – another of Carlos’s ‘moments’. Amazingly, ‘they’re also entirely practical’, says the architect, stopping the room from becoming a greenhouse in summer. ‘I like dressing functionality up as a beautiful experience.’
Theatre comes from what’s in the rooms too. Designed specifically for the house, Elliot’s pieces – there are nine of them – are natural focal points throughout the house, imbuing the spaces as they do with the same wit and beauty that defines all his work. (Take, for instance, his ivory-linen ‘Citron Pressé’ sofa, its feet six perfectly dimpled lemons), but so are the objects and bits of furniture he and Orlando have sourced collaboratively for the place, many of which – including a rare pair of Shiro Kuramata ‘Apple Honey’ chairs, designed in 1985 – have been hauled back to Hackney in the back of Orlando’s trusty Golf.
The mix of things here feels casual, though of course it’s cleverer than that. ‘While my stuff talks about design history,’ Elliot says, ‘it’s all quite shiny and new. We had to get a bit of age and texture in.’ Besides, ‘I find the idea of only having one designer throughout a space pretty horrendous.’ Now, with the addition of things like the two Le Corbusier chairs (‘Bolted, not welded!’ Elliot says gleefully. ‘That’s how you know they’re really old’) opposite the sofa, things feel more ‘anchored’.
While he knows what he likes, Orlando – whose eye was shaped by his art-dealer father and artist mother – says he valued Elliot’s perfectionism perhaps more than anything. ‘When Carlos’s work was done, I was just so ready to move in. We’d throw ideas around that didn’t feel right but I’d still be tempted to go for them so that I could get on with living. But Elliot was brilliant. He’d say: “It’s not the thing. It’s nice, but it’s not right.”’ In fact, he credits the designer with being his ‘steady hand’ throughout the entire process, one that can feel dizzying even when the architect is a friend.
It’s clear the chemistry between the three is just right. Perhaps more than anything, their friendship afforded them a valuable directness. ‘I couldn’t tell many of my clients to shut up,’ laughs Elliot, and not many respond to a designer’s ideas with a straightforward ‘Nah…’ over WhatsApp. Nor do many house-builders hash things out over a quiet pint with the architect – though perhaps they should. For what the trio have created here is not just a testament to their creativity, but to their companionship. Magic indeed.
For more about EJR Barnes’s work, visit ejrbarnes.com. For more about Carlos Sanchez’s work, visit sanchezbenton.co.uk
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