Words Kate Jacobs
Photography Ellen Hancock
Balcony photography Peter Molloy

Not many couples’ back story involves a first encounter over dinner at their own dining table. Admittedly, back in 2008, the table – and the apartment itself – belonged solely to Jewlsy Mathews. An optometrist, she met polymath and architect Mike McMahon when he came over as a friend of her flatmate. They started dating a year later and Mike moved in with Jewlsy in 2012. Since then, he’s been steadily improving this three-bedroom apartment, set on the second floor of an early noughties low-rise block on the edge of the epic Kings Cross development, creating a series of custom-made pieces for the place and transforming it into a laboratory for his endless store of ideas, somewhere to freely experiment with material, form and function.

The history of the world was told in 100 objects by art historian Neil MacGregor. It might be interesting to undertake a similar narrative endeavor here; to tell the story of this creative couple in… How many objects? Perhaps seven, 10, a dozen: the key pieces that define this home.

The tale of this apartment naturally unfolds, object by object, as Mike darts about the space, first singling out one of eight birch dining chairs – in fact the prototype piece – gesturing to the subtle differences between it and the final design, each detail representing valuable lessons learned. He moves on to the latest iteration of the chair, now black, made in a sustainable material composed of recycled paper named Richlite. The chairs are stunningly sculptural but also reassuringly ergonomic.

The many insights gained in this liberating creative process all feed back into his practice, Mike McMahon Studio, which he founded with Jewlsy in 2022 (she now works across design reviews, studio management, HR, finance, even building their website). They’re about to release a furniture collection based on the pieces in the apartment. “When we took part in an Open House weekend, the recurring question from visitors was, ‘Where can we buy these pieces?’ So we are doing something about that,” explains Mike. But the practice’s holistic approach spans architecture, interiors, furniture and landscape design, offering a pleasingly cohesive package to clients, who include large commercial developers as well as smaller residential clients.

The practice’s particular passions include sustainability and urban greening. Both elements are very much in evidence here in the apartment, but the urban greening is more obvious, with the apartment’s two balconies teeming with lush greenery even in early spring, while in summer they truly live up to their nickname of ‘junglettes’; in fact, this summer they’re going ‘on tour’, as it were, with the couple taking their verdant concept to world-class horticultural showcase the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in May. The balconies help to offset the couple’s desire for a garden, a necessary trade off for the family’s otherwise hugely satisfying life in central London. Here, the couple tell us their “contemporary Kings Cross story”.

Jewlsy: “When I was looking to buy, I chose this place for its light and space, but its skeleton was fairly basic, with uninspiring fixtures and fittings. Year on year, Mike has slowly transformed a pretty prosaic apartment into something extraordinary. He’s created all these moments all over our home by squeezing interest into every corner; from the balcony pond to the reading nook to the shutters on our son, Milo’s, bed. Mike has an uncanny ability to take a limitation, such as a difficult layout or awkward recess, and create an opportunity. He can reframe a previously ill-considered or unresolved plan into something that feels like it was intentional from the get-go.”

Mike: “When I first saw the apartment, I had a problem with its proportions; there were lots of weird kinks in the space. I wanted to turn these negatives into positives. The beam that runs through the main space was boxed in with plasterboard, for instance, so we revealed it and painted it in a Richard Rogers-inspired yellow, to celebrate it.

“The first things I built for the flat were the bookshelves by the dining table, which both curate our collection of curiosities and conceal a storage heater. They are a subtle nod to the façade of Rafael Moneo’s city hall in Murcia. At the other end of the main room, we’ve created a reading nook surrounded by storage in what was previously an unresolved, curtained-off junk cupboard. Now it looks almost like a 3D painting, though the shapes of the cupboards aren’t arbitrary; they’re designed to store the domestic necessities of life, things like a ladder and an ironing board.”

Jewlsy: “I love the fact that Mike’s creations aren’t just aesthetic, they’re highly practical. The functional elements of beautiful design have always fascinated me – those little nudges you can make that encourage low-effort, clutter-free living, such as the concealed Finnish drying rack over the sink, avoiding the visual mess of the washing up, or the pop-down electrical sockets in the kitchen, which means the splashback isn’t peppered with plugs.”

Mike: “We have space for non-functional beauty too: our artwork is a mixture of pieces by friends, items we’ve collected together and my own sketches and photographs, inspired by our travels. They weave together the narrative of our shared history.”

Jewlsy: “One of our favourite pieces is of some framed palm reeds etched with Malayalam script that come from my 200-year-old ancestral home in the backwaters of Kerala. They form part of a collection of hundreds that my dad keeps in a basket in his attic. Made at a time before paper was widely used, they bear the original deeds of the property.”

Mike: “Reconfiguring the kitchen was a big project. Opening it up to create vistas, we split the larger bedroom in two at the same time. There’s a good mix of materials in here: the cabinet doors are spruce Tilly board; the folded paper-pressed tiles we chose because they felt timeless. We cast the concrete for upright panels of the counter against Douglas fir reused from 4 Pancras Square, a project I was part of when I worked at Eric Parry Architects. We did that on-site with some friends; one of them described it as the Shoreditch version of an Amish barn raising. I like the way the board-marked sections are juxtaposed with the polished worktop. Seeking out those tactile or textural qualities has given this project coherence, which is more interesting to me than any trend or style.”

Jewlsy: “I love watching people reach out to touch the kitchen tiles, the Dinesen Douglas fir used to make our sofa frame and coffee table, and the board-marked concrete. These beautiful materials invite nature in.”

Mike: “The Douglas fir has an incredible grain and it comes in extraordinary dimensions – 40mm thick and 450mm wide. It’s timber in its purest form. To see this heavy piece of wood just floating on concrete piloti legs, like a Le Corbusier building, as it does in our sofa, is amazing. For the coffee table we used the same piloti form, but in cork not concrete. Cork doesn’t have the same material strength as concrete, so we used multiple legs in an undulating line. There are piloti legs on the dining table too, but they’re oval-shaped like the table itself, which has a hollow for a fruit bowl in the centre. There’s something captivating about a circle within an oval.

“Then there are versatile cabinets and credenzas throughout the rooms. The one between the living and dining areas has been specially made to conceal the heater, but the back section is demountable to offer flexibility for the future. And we designed the sofa to be modular, so it would still work well in a new setting. For me, adaptability is an important element of sustainability. You have to think about each piece’s ongoing existence and ask how it’s going to work in its second and third life.”

Jewlsy: “Mike’s head is constantly exploding with ideas, but bringing those ideas to fruition is really important to him; not doing so would feel incredibly wasteful. I’ve learned to recognise the glint in his eye that means there’s an idea brewing. I’ll silently hand him his sketchbook and watch the next kernel of our home grow and unfold.”