Berlin, Germany

Preview - The Client Who Changed Their Mind Twice

The first brief was for a minimal apartment. The second brief, after six months of design work, was for a comfortable apartment. The third and final brief — arrived at after a long dinner at which both clients were honest with themselves for the first time — was for a warm, generous space that would also be beautiful.

Umbria, Italy

Preview - A Small House in the Hills

The client bought the house on the basis of a photograph. She had never been to Umbria. She arrived to find a structure that had not been inhabited since the 1970s, with no running water, no electricity, and a roof that was structurally adequate in summer only.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Preview - What the Client Forgot to Ask For

Every project eventually reveals a thing the client didn't know they wanted. In this case, it was the kitchen. The clients — two lawyers with a combined work schedule that left almost no time for cooking — had asked for a minimal kitchen, as small as possible. They got a kitchen that became the centre of the apartment.

Paris, France

Preview - For the Collector Who Lives Lightly

The brief was a paradox: my client owns seven hundred objects — paintings, prints, ceramics, glass — and wanted a home that felt empty. He had been offered advice by every designer he had ever met, and had declined it all, choosing instead to live in a series of rented apartments where he could hang things freely without committing to walls.

Kyoto, Japan

Preview - Silence and Steel in Kyoto

The house belonged to a retired professor of classical Japanese literature who wanted, paradoxically, nothing Japanese in it. Not as a rejection of his culture but as a relief from it — forty years of scholarship had made him hunger for blankness.

Madrid, Spain

Preview - The Madrid House That Learned to Wait

The brief arrived three years before I could take the project. The owner — a retired magistrate — had bought a nineteenth-century townhouse in Chamberí, gutted it to bare concrete and brick, and then stopped. He wanted to wait until he found someone who understood what he was doing.

Belgrade, Serbia

Preview - Hand-Built in Belgrade

I am, first of all, a furniture maker. The interiors came later, when clients who bought my pieces started asking me to design the rooms they would live in. I accepted reluctantly. I have come to understand that the two practices are inseparable — you cannot design a room without understanding how objects are made.

Accra, Ghana

Preview - An Accra Home, Reimagined

My client had spent fifteen years in Paris before returning to build the house he always intended to build. He had a particular problem: he needed a home that could hold both versions of himself — the Ghanaian who had grown up in Osu, and the man who had spent fifteen years in the 11th arrondissement.

Dalarna, Sweden

Preview - A Swedish House in Winter

The farmhouse was built in 1887 and had not been significantly altered since the 1960s. I removed the double glazing immediately — original Swedish pine windows, properly maintained, perform better than most people assume. My clients wanted a house that could absorb the chaos of a large family without appearing to try.

London, England

Preview - A House in East London

The brief was almost nothing — which is my favourite kind. The client, a composer, wanted a place to think. No television. No dining table large enough for more than four people. A kitchen that could disappear when not in use. A place to hear the rain.

Preview - The Belgrade Apartment, Made by Hand

I am, first of all, a furniture maker. The interiors came later, when clients who bought my pieces started asking me to design the rooms they would live in. I accepted reluctantly at first. I have come to understand that the two practices are inseparable — you cannot design a room without understanding how objects are made, and you cannot make objects without understanding the rooms they will inhabit.

Preview - Between Two Worlds in Accra

My client had spent fifteen years in Paris before returning to Accra to build the house he had always intended to build. He arrived back with a particular problem: he had become someone different in those fifteen years, and he needed a home that could hold both versions of himself — the Ghanaian who had grown up in Osu, and the man who had spent a decade and a half in the 11th arrondissement. He did not want to choose.

Preview - An Antebellum House, Held Lightly

Working on historic Southern architecture requires a kind of ethical patience I didn't fully understand until this project. The house — a pre-Civil War single in the Ansonborough neighbourhood of Charleston — had been through six owners and four renovations before it came to my clients, a historian and her sculptor husband. Parts of it had been, as the historian put it, "improved to within an inch of its life." Our work was largely corrective.

Preview - East London Stillness

The brief was almost nothing — which is my favourite kind. The client, a composer, wanted a place to think. No television. No dining table large enough for more than four people. A kitchen that could disappear when not in use. A place to hear the rain.

Preview - A Manhattan Loft Finds Its Quiet

I first saw the apartment in February. The broker had left a window open and there was snow on the sill, which I took as a sign of something — honesty, maybe. The bones were extraordinary: original cast-iron columns, fourteen-foot ceilings, north light flooding through factory windows that hadn't been replaced since the 1920s. The clients, a couple in their late forties who collect contemporary ceramics, wanted something that would hold their objects without competing with them.