If you were fortunate enough, during one of London’s many design festivals, to nab an invite to the home-studio of Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard, you’ll have followed an inconspicuous alleyway through a private door into a fantastical double-height postindustrial space. The dark brick foyer opened into a collection of expansive, raw galleries — formerly part of a carriage wheel workshop — displaying the duo’s amorphous hand-formed metal sculptures and colossal contemporary furnishings. A richly designed residential level was up the stairs and out of sight. And outside a pair of iron doors, a quietly burbling garden unfurled within a border of birch trees, belying the buzzy Clerkenwell location. Not a single visitor entered without taking pause — the experience was visceral.
Now the property’s 4,000 atmospheric square feet are being sold for £3.95m by the artist-designers who call themselves Fredrikson Stallard. The collectible works will be gone — some to museums like the V&A and MoMA — but the dramatic volumes that housed them are still suitably grand. ‘After over a decade, these walls still hold the collective energy of every experiment and event,’ said the designers in a statement, ‘proving to us daily that our practice is a total experience that constantly refines how we see the world.’
The main floor remains open and flexible, with a former ceramics studio and a sequence of showrooms. The courtyard retreat is designed like a Japanese garden, finished in Italian travertine with calming fountains. Upstairs is a custom kitchen, dining and living space with oak parquet flooring and dusky marble accents. ‘For 14 years our studio in London has been far more than just a place where we work,’ the designers said. ‘It has evolved into one of our greatest and most immersive creations. It is a living, breathing environment that completely dissolves the boundary between our lives and our art… Every smallest detail of the building has been deeply considered — exquisite materials, timeless and elegant contrasts of noble materials together with metals and stones, often patinated and burnished by our own hands.’
The private garden is planted with 200 silver birch trees that offers a feeling of immersion in nature at the centre of Dickensian London. When the space was first completed, the BBC named it a finalist in its Gardeners’ World Garden of the Year competition. ‘Being surrounded by trees, birdsong and the sounds of fountains has the restorative nature of the countryside,’ say the couple, ‘yet we remain in the heart of London.’
‘From the outside it feels discreet and almost hidden, but once inside it opens up into something incredibly expansive and immersive,’ says Becky Fatemi, executive partner at United Kingdom Sotheby’s International Realty. ‘It is as much a creative environment as it is a place to work and spend time, and that is what makes it so rare.’
