London Loft

London Loft is a minimalist residence located in London, United Kingdom, designed by Tutto Bene. Converting institutional architecture into domestic space requires reconciling the building’s original purpose with the intimacy of daily life. This former Edwardian sports hall achieves that balance by embracing rather than erasing its pedagogical past – the 1902 T.J. Bailey school building becomes both workspace and home through careful spatial layering that honors Victorian bones while establishing contemporary rituals of making and living.

The triple-height ground floor functions as Tutto Bene’s studio, lit only through clerestory windows set high in the gable end. This absence of street-level views creates productive introversion – the kind of focused environment that workshops and ateliers have long cultivated. Six-meter white walls rise around the original herringbone floor, where century-old brass hooks once secured badminton nets. Victorian columns that formerly delineated changing rooms now punctuate the open plan, their fluted profiles providing vertical rhythm without subdividing the volume. The furniture selection balances mid-century refinement with brutalist weight: Fritz Hansen Ant chairs gather around a vintage Saarinen marble table, while a Belgian oak cabinet grounds the space with material heft. A quartet of black paintings reads alternately as windows to night sky or white crosses – the same technique used in butter-yellow works elsewhere, demonstrating how surface treatment can invert spatial perception.

A zinc spiral stair winds upward through the residential levels, threading between slender Victorian columns that rise through all three floors. The mezzanine tucks a deep brown sofa beneath a massive corbel, creating a compressed moment before the bedroom opens beneath the roof trusses. These original timber members form pointed arches braced with riveted steel plates – the kind of hybrid construction that characterizes late Victorian engineering, where traditional carpentry meets industrial metal joinery. Tall glazed panels between the trusses frame only sky, reinforcing the building’s lighthouse-like orientation away from urban context.

The bedroom sits at the apex, where a six-meter atelier window and overhead trusses create what the designers describe as dreamlike – though the effect seems more precise than fantasy. Sleeping beneath exposed structure recalls the spatial discipline of Japanese minka or Shaker meetinghouses, where domestic life unfolds under legible architectural logic. The bed remains deliberately low and monolithic, grounding the body against the acrobatic verticality of the spiral climb.

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