“I’ve always liked smaller rooms,” says decorator Daniel Slowik. “I enjoy walking through a series of rooms and seeing how they unfold, the vistas they open up.” As the modern love affair with open plan layouts fades, the diminutive Hackney flat that he shares with decorator and designer Benedict Foley, is an example to us all of how to deal with a small space without (entirely) submitting to the open plan fallacy.
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The flat occupies the ground floor of an 1830s house in the leafy streets between Dalston and Canonbury. Daniel bought it in 2003, when the area was still up and coming and hadn’t arrived quite as decisively as it has now. “There were bars on the windows and the neighbourhood was a bit run down, but what drew me in was the attractive flat-fronted building. They were sought after even then, but this place was quite reasonable.”
Tiny but with the proverbial good bones, the flat consists of two main rooms, a sitting room at the front of the house, and a bedroom at the back, with a miniature hallway and kitchen as you enter, and a bathroom downstairs in the house’s old coal hole. When Daniel, who was then working as a decorator at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, first came to it, it had a slightly different layout, with a corridor between the bedroom and sitting room. He kept this intact and undertook a light initial refurbishment, putting in central heating, painting it off-white and filling it with antiques.
The transformation into its current incarnation began when Benedict came along a decade or so after. What made it enchanting for him was the quality of the light: “My first impression was that I enjoyed the division of the spaces with these two principal rooms with wonderful light on both sides. You don’t often get dual aspect light from equally large windows in a London flat.” As they embarked on a more thorough renovation together, the way forward did indeed seem to lie in making it entirely open plan, letting the light flow from front to back.
What they in fact ended up with was a compromise between an open-plan layout and one that retained the separation and the vistas both Benedict and Daniel value. The most crucial change was to remove the profusion of doors and the unnecessary corridor. “It used to be that you came into the hallway and were faced with three doors,” Benedict remembers. “You could go through these doors into the kitchen, sitting room or corridor, and you then got two more doors into the bedroom or bathroom. We seem to specialise in houses with more door than wall” – here he points out the dining room of their Suffolk cottage, which has an extraordinary five doors all to itself. It became particularly imperative to remove them after an unfortunate incident in which they managed to close all the doors on each other and became trapped.
Once the doors and corridor were gone, they were left with a bedroom and sitting room that were essentially one large space. Rather than opening everything else up too, though, they decided to keep a separate kitchen and hallway. “Having a little kitchen squatting in the corner of the room doesn’t make things feel bigger, it just emphasises that you don’t have enough space for everything,” remarks Benedict. Retaining the hallway has also created a pleasing effect of transitioning between spaces. Coming in from the outdoors, the hallway is a dark and enveloping space, painted in a specially blended brown shade that the pair refer to as ‘goose poo’. From here the entrance to the sitting room, luxuriously lined in off-white linen, is a glorious opening up of space. “I’ve always liked the transition at the Sir John Soane Museum,” notes Daniel, where you have these light-filled rooms and then this crammed, dark museum corridor, and this is the same sort of effect.”
A similar transition takes place between the sitting room and bedroom. These are now semi-open plan, with a large opening between them that can be curtained off if desired. While the sitting room is pale and pared-back, painted in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Shaded White’, the bedroom is busier, painted in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Light Blue’, with panelled walls crowded with pictures. The contrast between them is not extreme, but it is interesting. “There’s quite a lot going on in the bedroom,” says Daniel, “so it’s nice that the sitting room is a more redacted space. It’s very clean, with no cabinets, fewer pictures, and this fabric walling that feels quite modern.” The pair took inspiration from the early interiors of Nancy Lancaster, as well as a range of other references from the early 20th century – “that point where people were moving into modernism but still paid attention to traditional detailing” – including Syrie Maugham and Maison Jansen.
Attention to details – traditional and otherwise – is a hallmark of the project. Daniel and Benedict designed furniture especially for the flat, including an ingenious convertible table, which can change from dining table height to coffee table height with the removal of a segment of the legs. The elegant sofa was also custom made, based on a sofa that Nancy Lancaster had at her house Ditchley Park. It sits at dining height so that the sitting room can become a dining room when required; there is storage space beneath it, and it can even serve as a slender single bed when necessary.
Another brilliant idea is the mirrored shutter that can be drawn across the front window, transforming and expanding the room on dark evenings, when candlelight can twinkle in its reflection. Much thought went into trimming the walls in the sitting room, which eventually ended up with a zigzag fillet designed by Benedict. “I often use braid in my projects," says Daniel, "but that felt too grand, and since we had no cornice, the fillet had to take the place of a cornice too.” For quite a small detail, it has a big impact, lending a sense of fun and a bit of an edge (figurative as well as literal) to the deeply comfortable scheme.
Enjoyably, the flat is both clever and learned, but firmly possessed of the sense of humour that runs through both Daniel and Benedict’s projects. There are myriad and wide-ranging references to the history of design: Colefax & Fowler and Sir John Soane we’ve already seen, but also Apsley House (for the mirrored shutter) and Versailles (for the real and faux marble that forms a theme through the flat). “Yes, it’s a teeny-tiny flat in Hackney,” says Benedict. “But why not take inspiration from grander spaces, if it adds something to your space? Some people get obsessed with appropriateness, but…”. “Rules are there for breaking?” suggests Daniel. “You do have to know the rules first,” Benedict returns. “And that’s why you call in the professionals,” finishes Daniel.
