A former mission hall in London transformed into a textile designer’s creative headquarters

The building itself – one massive double-height space – was impressive but wore the scars of its various iterations, with a clunky first-floor office, a crude partition wall slicing a window in half, strange hospital-style doors punched into its façade and blocked-up windows. Three dormer windows, as seen in a 1909 photograph, were gone, as were ornate finials along the roofline.

‘It just needed a rethink,’ says Lucy, who called on her friend, the architect James Stevens. They had met 18 years before when the pair had both worked for Retrouvius, the design studio known for its intelligent use of salvaged materials. James, who set up on his own in 2015 and now also runs Edinburgh craft gallery Bard, had helped Lucy with her Hackney terrace house in 2013 and the pair shared a similar philosophy. ‘James is entirely practical and I knew this was the sort of building he’d love,’ she says. ‘My first thought was that it had such exciting potential,’ he observes.

Ben Anders

Lucy’s approach to her work is to ‘find a beautiful textile and imagine what it might become’. She took the same tack here, with James’s guidance. ‘I had a vague idea, but he blew it out of the water,’ she says. His vision centred around the creation of a first floor, sitting just above the ground-floor window line, to provide an enchanting workroom for Lucy’s team. ‘Unlike many ecclesiastical buildings, this one split into floors comfortably,’ Lucy explains.

James also carved out space on the first floor for a small, self-contained live-work space, complete with a niftily hidden bath. This is now reached via the staircase, which hangs down – almost defying belief – in the only remaining double-height space. ‘We nicknamed it Dumbledore’s office,’ says Lucy. The space downstairs was divided in two – one part of which is a double-height area that plays host to a studio kitchen, meeting table, staircase and mezzanine level. ‘I felt it was crucial to keep some of the full, soaring height to honour the original meeting hall,’ says James. This space leads through to the other half of downstairs: a series of rooms reached via an arched corridor – its shape inspired by the existing windows – which serve as showrooms for Lucy’s latest creations, including a new full-tester bed set.

In the meeting hall, a double-height hall, kitchen and meeting area respects the soaring space of the original mission hall. Pigment-tinted raw plaster walls and a staircase and kitchen in Douglas fir – sourced from Whitney Sawmills in Herefordshire – are the backdrop for Lucy’s vast medieval-tapestry-inspired panels. ‘Influences for the woodwork ranged from the modernist timber organ casings at Coventry Cathedral to the staircases at Hogwarts,’ says James.

Ben Anders