Words Billie Brand
Photography Ellen Christina Hancock

It’s a bright morning in Elephant and Castle and at the home of Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual, a two-storey apartment within a brutalist 1960s tower block, the floor is shimmering in the sunlight. The pleasing pearlescent material, which runs underfoot in the kitchen, dining and living area, could easily be mistaken for a terrazzo or something of the ilk. In fact, it’s a bespoke substance that’s as kind to the planet as it is covetable, which the couple created using waste oyster and mussel shells as part of their practice, Cooking Sections.

Alon and Daniel, who met at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University, founded Cooking Sections, which spans art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics, in 2013. Through long-term projects involving performance, film and installation, the collective uses food as a tool to explore landscapes in transformation, from Palestine to Scotland. ‘Climavore’, for instance, examines how humans eat as the climate changes (and earned Cooking Sections a Turner Prize nomination in 2021), while ‘[Salmon Salmon [Salmon]]’ is a deep dive into the fish and how intensive farming is impacting its colour.

Naturally, their home has become a test bed and springboard for their bright ideas. “Our practice is personal and professional,” says Alon. “We don’t separate the two.” From the salmon-pink colour palette to their art collection of art, which includes a horseshoe sculpture by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen and a sea-blue abstract painting by Tyra Tingleff, their décor is something of a homage to the work they live and breathe. Alon and Daniel say it’s not about aesthetics, which is almost hard to believe as, with its complementary pastel tones and thriving community of lush house plants, the space is a pure delight – and a pleasure to be in. But here, over coffee, the work-and-life partners explain why, for them, it’s substance over style.

Daniel: “The first time we saw this building I said: “Wow. I would love to live there one day.” We’d stayed overnight at a friend’s house round the corner and noticed it through the window. Although we had always lived in south London, we had never seen it before. We were previously living in shared spaces with very good friends of ours, first in Peckham and then New Cross.

“The building is a modernist tower completed in 1968, with a rich history. It was designed by George Finch, a council architect working on incredible social housing. His partner was Kate Macintosh, who also designed a lot of council estates for Lambeth, including Dawson Heights. That was part of our desire to live here; we’re fascinated with its heritage. Also, the flat itself is very beautiful with generous proportions.

“We applied the same way of thinking to the flat as we do our work. We moved in five years ago and lived here for two years before changing anything so that we could understand the light, in the same way that when a museum commissions us, we have to understand the context of the project. We also talk to people on the ground – and that’s what we did here. We spoke to experts who know this kind of building. After those conversations, we developed proposals. For example, we had an idea for a plant-based material for the cabinetry in the kitchen, then our carpenter came back with other ideas and we’d go back and forth. In the end, we landed on linoleum, but there were lots of conversations.

“The layout of the flat has stayed the same. As the walls are precast concrete, they can’t change much. But it means there’s very good sound insulation; you can barely hear people in the other flats. But what we have tried to do is incorporate some ideas that we tested in our own work in terms of materials. For instance, one of the main features is the lower-ground flooring, which we added a layer to. Instead of that being carpet or laminate, we wanted to test something new we’ve been developing, which is a replacement for cement: a terrazzo-looking material made with waste oyster shells.”

Alon: “We’ve been collecting shells for quite a while. Since 2016, we’ve been part of a project on the Isle of Skye that looks at the effects of intensive salmon farms and the terrestrial environment. Through that, we collaborated with 10 local restaurants that have removed salmon off their menu and introduced ‘Climavore’ dishes instead, which are made from ocean cleaners such as oysters, mussels and seaweed.”

Daniel: “Restaurants take a high volume of shells to landfill, which is why we started thinking about what we could do with them and how they can be reused as a building material. It feels great to have the finished material in our home. We’re very happy. If we’re preaching to other people about it, we need to test it in our own everyday space first.”

Alon: “The pantry is a space for our research – it holds the ingredients we collect from different places and invites us to explore the systems that enable them to arrive in a domestic environment. That’s something that is very important to us. The kitchen is by no means a laboratory, though, and food isn’t necessarily the medium we work with, but it’s through food we think and talk about different systems.”

Daniel: “We have two libraries – a library of books and a library of ingredients. It’s about all the little details. There hasn’t been a huge transformation. We’ve kept the essence of the flat but added glimpses into our own work.

“The starting point for the pink palette was the investigation of salmon and its synthetic colour that we’ve been working on for the past four years. Salmon are naturally pink because they eat krill and shrimp, but in farms, the fish are fed synthetic colours to match what consumers demand of their flesh. Looking into that unleashed a lot of work trying to understand how certain colours are missing and changing and how that gives us clues that something is wrong with the environment.”

Daniel: “In many flats, showers have no windows, so we wanted to make a very big one. As one facing outside wasn’t possible, we made a window adjacent to the interior space. It also has its own microclimate in there – it’s almost like a little sauna. We put an ultraviolet light in there to help our plants grow, so when humans aren’t using it, non-humans can.”

Alon: “We always have friends round and we really enjoy hosting – big meals for 10 to 12 people – and there’s always space for people to stay here too. We both cook dinner, but we have different approaches. One of us is more meticulous, and the other anarchic…”

Daniel: “We usually cook something from the Climavore diet, which uses ingredients that respond to new seasons appearing with the climate emergency. In places like London, you go to the supermarket and find pretty much everything all year round, unless you go to very niche shops. So, for the average consumer, it’s quite homogenous throughout the year. There’s a loss of diversity in the supermarket, because there’s a loss of diversity in the fields.

“We’ve been thinking about the end of seasons as we know them – summer, spring, autumn and winter – and about other seasons that are emerging, such as one of drought, polluted ocean, flash floods. How do we then adapt food systems – but also our choices – to those? What would it mean to eat drought-resistant ingredients in a period of drought? Or what would it mean to eat regenerative water ingredients in a period of polluted oceans? Last year, we worked with the Serpentine Gallery to develop more recipes with ingredients that regenerate the soil, such as ancient grains, pulses and beans. We try to bring some of those ingredients to our dinner table.”

Alon: “What drives our home is not thinking about interiors but how the space has been created and manufactured. How do we enable things to happen? What does it take to start embedding oyster shells in the floor? What are the processes and consequences of such an action?”

Daniel: “We think about the whole supply chain. In the same way that we’re talking about where a grain of barley comes from and how that nourishes the soil and gut, we’re thinking about how a material connects to waste in our flat. Of course, it has to be pleasing, but that’s not the main focus of our work.”