For all but the very wealthiest of London’s prospective homeowners, buying a house means making compromises – and plenty of them. With sky-high property prices and an ultra-competitive market, aspiring buyers often turn to irregular plots of land or unusual buildings. Tanya Grigoroglou and Rupert Worral’s Clapham home embraced a dose of the latter. Purchased in 2019, the couple’s two-storey Victorian had been awkwardly converted into a mixed-use commercial plot, sequestering the bedrooms and living spaces into the gloomy basement. But thanks to a recent transformation by local firm O’Sullivan Skoufoglou Architects, the home — dubbed Raw House — returns to its residential roots while elegantly incorporating a new kind of mixed-use program.
To rethink the 140-square-metre layout, the London-based firm’s mandate was to transform Raw House into both a family home and a functioning home gallery. The owners, founders of the London-based private gallery: RAW Editions, hoped to open up the lower floors for public access, while turning the upper floors into a fully private space.
“We wanted to give a sense of lightness to the lower two floors, typical to a small London west end gallery, and at the same time reconcile this with the idea of a home. Tanya and Rupert often discussed their need and ambition of displaying the art in their home in a way that would make visitors empathize with the domestic scale of the spaces,” says Jody O’Sullivan, Director at O’Sullivan Skoufoglou Architects.
Turning away from a typical all-white showroom, the lower floors feature painted pastel walls in light pinks and yellows, infusing warm accents into an otherwise minimalist interior scheme. And a custom inset fireplace wall in red terrazzo steals the show — and doubles as a plinth for changing artworks. With floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the backyard greenery, the living room lets the light in. But all it takes to turn public to private are the sliding shutters — or just slip away up the staircase, tucked into the corner for privacy.
Downstairs, the kitchen boasts more subtle colour: a maroon marbled countertop pairs with the red Vola sink faucet and a pastel linseed oil stain on the plywood cabinets energizes the birch wood grain. Further touches, like the inlaid concrete tiles in the flooring and the wooden benches that line the wall (offering both storage and seating) add an architectural flair while retaining the simplicity of a gallery setting.
Extending into the sculptural back garden, the triangular back door (mirrored by a trilateral oriel window directly across the kitchen) opens into a brutalist-inspired stepped walkway by London-based GRDN. Another angular configuration, the stairs work their way comfortably into the uneven landscape — a feature prominently visible from the upstairs windows.
In the private spaces upstairs, the design amps up the emphasis on tactile materiality. Smooth inset closet systems in light pastels infuse the bedrooms with a polished tranquility.
And in the bathrooms — far from the bustle of the main floor — wall tiling in light pink, blue and green helps to foster an unencumbered yet cocoon-like ambiance.
“The design of our hybrid home and gallery space could not be more true to RAW’s ethos and our desire to integrate art with life. Amalia and Jody cleverly used every inch of our house and enhanced the seamless transition between public and private, work and everyday life, opening up possibilities we hadn’t imagined” says homeowner Tanya Grigoroglou.
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