Hackney Apartment | Laura Lakin Design

The flat is in an old school building in Hackney, East London. It hadn’t been touched since it was converted in the 1990s and it needed a lot of work - everything felt very dated. As the property was designed for two young creative professionals to live in, we had to reconfigure the layout to make 2 better sized bedrooms and an additional bathroom. Initially the flat had one master bedroom and one smaller bedroom which had a curved wall - a 1990s feature which is highly impractical in most situations. We wanted to bring more light and openness into the flat so we created new partition walls with steel and glass windows. This also added to the industrial feel of the space.

In terms of the aesthetics, we were also inspired by Scandinavian design choosing a mostly monochrome palette and incorporating wooden accents. To add a touch of luxury to the space, we used materials like marble in the ensuite shower room and for the kitchen splash back. We played with the duality between light and dark - notibly when you enter the flat, the hall is almost black and this follows onto the kitchen in the living area - the rest of the space then becomes white. The hall was always going to be a dark space due to the lack of windows so we decided to embrace that and make it more dramatic. The white and black walls made for a great backdrop for the artwork, which ranged from traditional family pieces to contemporary art.