The Factory

The Factory is a minimalist home located in London, United Kingdom, designed by McLaren.Excell. Luke McLaren’s approach to this loft renovation reveals something profound about how contemporary designers negotiate the tension between preservation and transformation. Rather than imposing a new aesthetic vocabulary, the studio chose subtraction as their primary tool, stripping away decades of accumulated layers to reveal the building’s structural bones. The exposed concrete beams that now dominate the space weren’t discovered by accident – they were deliberately uncovered, each surface carefully considered for its textural contribution to the whole.

The genius lies in McLaren.Excell’s material restraint. Where many designers might have been tempted to introduce complexity, they committed to what McLaren calls “a really simple palette” – Clayworks plaster, Dinesen Douglas Fir, blackened steel, and Nordic Blue stone. This disciplined approach echoes the Brutalist architects of the 1960s, who similarly celebrated raw concrete’s honest expression, yet here the palette serves a more nuanced purpose. Each material carries both tactile richness and visual weight, creating what design theorist Adrian Forty might recognize as “material intelligence” – surfaces that reveal their making while serving contemporary needs.

The custom dining table and pendant lights exemplify this philosophy in microcosm. Fabricated from blackened steel, they don’t merely occupy space but engage in dialogue with the building’s industrial past. The oxidized surface treatment creates a patina that suggests age while remaining unmistakably contemporary – a temporal sleight of hand that contemporary craft practice has perfected.

Most compelling is the studio’s treatment of the Nordic Blue stone elements. The sandblasted bench and basins transform a typically polished material into something almost geological, their abraded surfaces suggesting erosion and time. This technique recalls the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, finding beauty in imperfection and weathering, yet here it serves to connect disparate elements through shared textural language.

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