‘Our idea was to create a perfect little hotel room in London, a bijou flat for a couple of nights a week,’ says Martin Brudnizki of the Holland Park pied-a-terre he shares with his partner Jonathan Brook. Perched on the second floor of a Georgian townhouse and overlooking a private garden, it is the quintessential jewel box of an apartment, luxuriously appointed and exquisitely finished in Martin’s signature style.
The couple, who work together at Martin’s eponymous design studio, spend as much time as possible at their house in the Sussex countryside, but needed to maintain a base in London for work. When Martin sold his own flat, they decided to renovate and move into this flat of Jonathan’s. The flat has a compact footprint – the sitting room and bedroom are essentially one long space running from the front to the back of the house, divided by a wall in the middle. Martin and Jonathan moved the door between them to allow light to flow through the entire flat. Off this central space is a miniature kitchen at the front , and a small entrance hall and bathroom at the other end of the room.
A curtain and pelmet in the same Marvic moiré as the walls divides the sitting room from the kitchen. One of a pair of Gothic Revival armchairs, upholstered in a flamestitch design, stands next to an antique tallboy.
Dean Hearne
The premise was to make it all feel ‘as sumptuous as possible,’ says Martin, ‘but a little more contemporary than our place in the country. We took the history of the apartment as a starting point: a Georgian building that was redeveloped into apartments after the war, so we would mix the classical in with the modern and take a kind of Hicks-ian approach.’ Strong colour and a bold patterned carpet were the starting point for a scheme that is indeed very much in the manner of David Hicks’ iconic mid-century interiors. Martin created a sumptuous base by lining the walls of the two main rooms in fabric – glowing gold moiré in the sitting room and chocolate brown mohair velvet in the bedroom, echoing these colours in the warm golden tiles of the bathroom and the tobacco brown paint in the kitchen.