Architect Jamie Fobert is perhaps best-known for his work on blue-chip cultural venues, which have included extensions and refurbs to Tate St Ives, Kettle’s Yard and Charleston House, as well as the yet-to-be-unveiled redevelopment of the National Portrait Gallery. His residential roster is equally accomplished, ranging from the much-lauded Levring House in Bloomsbury to a comprehensive overhaul to a townhouse on King Henry’s Road in Primrose Hill.

Jamie’s own house, which he shares with his partner Dominique Gagnon, is located on the top floors of a Victorian warehouse building the couple developed in the early 2000s. Finding beauty in the building’s curved façade, tall ceilings and original features, Jamie set upon a light-handed refurbishment that installed contemporary living spaces into the existing structure. Here, he tells us how the project reflects his style of architecture, including why the messiness of a kitchen is, for him, always best left out of sight.

Jamie: “I think a house is a very specific thing, and it’s the root of all architecture. For thousands and thousands of years, there were houses, and probably some religious structures, long before anyone came up with another building type. It’s the most human, elemental need: shelter. And I think some of the most basic principles of what a house is have never changed. 

“There’s a wonderful text by Dom Hans van der Laan, a Belgian monk who built beautiful buildings. He wrote one of my favourite texts that says architecture should be like a sandal to a foot: just hard enough to withstand the rough ground and just soft enough to be comfortable. I think it sums up how I approach domestic spaces.

“Our practice is mostly known for its arts and cultural projects, but we’ve worked on lots of residential projects too. The difference between those spaces is how you occupy them, obviously. Designing someone’s house, you have to be very careful not to make it sensational, because a home is where people have to wake up every morning, somewhere where they have to come home to, where they have to be on a rainy day, where they have to be when they’re feeling ill and where they celebrate and entertain.

“Homes can have wonderful moments in them, but they also have to be places you can be in all day. Comfort and ease of use have to be primary. I get really irritated by houses that come across as architects just trying to show off.

“Also, you occupy the interior of a house much more than you ever experience the exterior. I think the interior as architecture is something which has been slightly lost. People seem to think that architecture is for the outside of buildings and the inside doesn’t really matter because you can just decorate. As a studio, we always design houses from the inside.

“We spent years looking for an empty site like this in London – they’re quite hard to find. We found this Victorian warehouse and the minute we walked in and saw the space that is now our living room, my immediate feeling was that I could just live in this room alone. The building already had all of those things that I respond to as an architect.

“We bought it and managed to get planning to convert it into two flats and office space. We didn’t have to make any grand architectural moves because they were here already, in the original design. In fact, the difficulty was finding ways to not ruin what was already here. A lot of the design was about ensuring we didn’t break up the original façade.

“The height of the ceiling and the timber (even though it had been painted and water-stained), the windows, the amount of light, the loading bay doors, the curving façade: the building is already beautiful, built probably by an engineer, some Victorian builder who just did the simplest thing.

“But, in a way, the process was the same as when we’re doing a new build. You decide what the important views are, the way rooms face to get certain light, what kind of volumes you want to have, then you figure out how to link them, and make them functional, comfortable and liveable.

“One of the things I appreciate about this house is that it’s incredibly nice to be by yourself here. It’s nice for two as well, and you can have 100 people downstairs – it’s just always comfortable.

“Another thing I really like, which I push for a lot in projects, is that the kitchen is hidden away but connected. I don’t want to be in a kitchen and not hear the conversation going on, but I’m also an incredibly messy cook, so I want that out of sight.

“People are always thinking you need to have the dining room next to the kitchen – why? I like what we have here, where the kitchen, living and dining rooms are all separate from each other but it’s one architectural space. I get really tired of these big spaces in which the kitchen is just sort of sitting there in the middle.

“If I was to do this project again now, I think it would look almost exactly the same. It was all about allowing the quality of the existing fabric to take centre stage and any additions we made couldn’t strike against that.

“We did change the kitchen a few years ago, though. We had just finished our summer house in Galicia, northern Spain, where we used chestnut, the local hardwood for all the joinery. We sent the drawings of the kitchen to the carpenters in Porto and they drove here with all the pieces, including the single piece of stainless steel that forms the worktop and sink.

“There are a number of pieces made in black steel here, which is a material we used in an exhibition in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern called The Upright Figure in 2002. We also designed some stools made from it for the Architectural Association, which we have prototypes of here, and we used it to make our bespoke dining table that reflects the curve of the building.

“I love black steel for its colour and materiality. I ask the fabricators to leave the weld marks coming through, so the making process is visible. In a way, it’s not trying too hard. But I think it’s quite important that if the design is done in this quite logical way, it also has to have something poetic about it. It has to be a combination because it can’t all just be dry and functional. You allow yourself to be quite whimsical momentarily, within an overall very calm environment.

“I think what I learnt here and have carried to my other projects is that the secret to domestic architecture is making people feel at ease. If you go to a public space, that can be quite exceptional because it’s an experience that won’t last longer than a couple of hours at most. But if it’s your home, it has to be somewhere you feel comfortable, and part of our jobs as architects is working out how to give that to clients.

“One of the first houses we ever worked on was an extension to a psychoanalyst’s home in Hampstead. At the end of the four-year project, he said it was the closest thing he’d ever experienced to the process of being analysed. You work incredibly closely for four years, speaking at least every day about the most intimate details of their lives, and then it stops.

“The process is very overwhelming for some people, because making choices is overwhelming. And that’s what architecture is: a chain of choices and decisions. The unsuccessful projects are where you can see all the different questions answered independently. The successful projects are the ones where those million questions end up with a single answer, just expressed in multiple ways.

“I read an interview with Bridget Riley, the painter, in which she said that when she starts a painting, she’s setting out certain criteria, things she wants to achieve. She has an idea of what it should be, but she said she knows the painting is going to be good at a certain moment when she no longer is making the decisions, the painting is.

“I knew exactly what she meant. There’s a certain point where the house tells you what you should do. It becomes the decision-maker. It’s not you. It’s not the client. It’s the house itself, because for it to become a singular home, there is only one answer for each those questions. I think that happened here – it was the integrity of the Victorian building that made the decisions.”

What do you think it means to live in a modern way?

“To be comfortable and relaxed in your home. A place where light, volume and materiality are all present and calming. To know every object in your house; where it came from, who made it, what memories it holds. To have only objects that are beautiful (in their own way) and which have meaning for you.”

Is there a house on The Modern House website that’s caught your eye?

“Far too many!”