Amwell Street

Located in the London borough of Islington, and sitting just a stone's throw away from Exmouth Market, the client for this project came to us with a desire to update the interior of their compact city apartment. The property is located on the ground floor within an early 90’s Neo-Georgian residential block. Due to its nature, it became clear early on that the scheme would need to focus around a reorganisation of the internal floorplan in order to maximise the potential. The existing property had a generously sized entrance hall but a narrow self contained kitchen and a cramped bathroom. The dividing wall between the kitchen, living room and hallway worked to make the circulation overly large and as a result created areas of unused space within the floorplan. Given the compact nature of the home, this felt unacceptable. The key design principle within this project was centred around opening up the floorplan and bringing about a fluidity to the interior. The idea here was to reduce the physical barriers and allow the previously strict designations of space to merge with one another. This merging of the zones helps to create the illusion of each area getting bigger and as such the apartment feels as though there has been a significant increase in size without any extensions being made. The dividing wall between the kitchen and living was removed as were the 2 dividing partitions between the kitchen, living and hallway. A new full height sliding pocket door was created to allow for the kitchen and living room to be closed off giving a huge amount of flexibility to the layout. Removing the dividing wall between the living and kitchen also afforded us the opportunity to remodel the kitchen and include an island with a breakfast bar. Finally the bathroom was remodelled to remove the bathtub and include a large walk in shower. His and her basins were introduced as well as a full width mirror, again allowing for the room to feel more spacious.