Interior Design
Mehrai Design
A traditional Primrose Hill villa, reimagined around the room at the centre of its owner's life — and the open flame at its heart.
Some clients commission a kitchen. This one commissioned a way of living, and asked the kitchen to carry it. A New Yorker drawn to the bones of a London villa — the cornicing, the ceiling height, the unhurried authority of the staircase — he cooks seriously, and wanted a house that took cooking as seriously as he does.
So the house was conceived from the stove outward. Its owner shaped the kitchen himself, alongside the studio, to a standard closer to a working restaurant than a domestic galley. The rotisserie carried as much weight as the cold store; the open flame was a first principle, not a finishing touch.
Mehrai Design's task was to honour both instincts at once — to keep the period villa entirely itself while threading a sharper, more exacting interior through it. Traditional detailing on the outside of every gesture; crisp stainless steel and stone at the core.
"The shaman of interiors," the client called the studio — half in jest, entirely in earnest.
Built with Roundhouse, the kitchen runs a steel line the length of one wall — a Wolf range, a Lacanche rotisserie over open flame, a Westin canopy drawing it all up. Pans hang on a rail; knives sit on a magnetic strip against a marble splashback; everything the cook reaches for stays in reach.
The island answers the steel with warmth: a bespoke piece in solid oak, its butcher's block designed by MD Collective, leathered stone above, blackened kitchen ironmongery by Buster + Punch. It is where the plates are kept, where the bread is cut, the surface the whole house gravitates toward.
Nothing is decorative for its own sake. The steel takes heat and repetition; the walnut warms it; the marble splashback and leathered stone give the eye somewhere to rest. It is a working kitchen finished to the standard of the rooms beyond it — and in that single decision, the whole house is explained.
The dining room is where the house entertains. A custom-made oval timber table sits beneath a cluster of hand-blown glass pendants by Holly Hunt; Minotti dining chairs in deep blue draw up to it. Above the Chesneys stone fireplace hangs the room's anchor — a work by Ethan Cook, weave as much as image, its blocks of red, cobalt and ice the loudest colour in an otherwise quiet palette.
Phillip Jeffries grasscloth gives the walls their grain; a vintage Persian rug grounds the floor.
Between kitchen and dining room sits a vintage drinks cabinet — bottles, decanters, a shelf of cocktail manuals — kept for the part of the evening that begins once the cooking is done. The house was planned around that ritual as much as the meal itself: a record set turning, a glass poured, the day allowed to slow.
Music runs through it. A Rega Planar 6 plays in the snug while he cooks, and the rooms were laid out for the way sound carries as much as for the way the eye travels.
Lighting does the quiet work after dark. Mehrai Design specified hand-blown glass feature pendants and wall sconces — counterweighted, ribbed, bronze-collared — alongside bespoke bar stools, all drawn from the Holly Hunt collection and tuned to each room. Architectural lighting by John Cullen and Rako keeps the period mouldings washed and the art lit.
Reclaimed Heritage Chantilly Old Tobacco flooring runs dark and worn, while a polished concrete finish climbs the wall alongside the cantilevered staircase. A Holly Hunt sconce catches the turn — the new and the found, deliberately mixed.
Vintage pieces, sourced from Paris markets and East London, are threaded throughout, so nothing feels bought all at once. Even the smallest moments are detailed: bronze drawer pulls, polished stone tops, the considered weight of every handle.
The staircase was kept — original tread, ironwork and all — and given a deep blue velvet runner from Stark, its handrail polished back to life. The walls climb past a hung collection: framed photography, a Harland Miller, a scatter of tiny skiers traversing the upper landing.
The period structure is left intact and unapologetic, the contemporary layered over it with a steady, knowing hand.
Interior design, bespoke lighting and furniture by Mehrai Design; the kitchen island designed by MD Collective.